


In my defense, spring.

by ameliameems



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fix-It, Homophobic Language, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, clown amnesia, romantic antagonism, this is like technically a coffee shop au but like. its not about the coffee shop really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:35:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24383644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ameliameems/pseuds/ameliameems
Summary: “So, I’m a barista, right? Well, recently, I was on the job and this guy came up to order. A totally normal looking dude, about my age, dresses like some kind of underling corporate schmuck. He ordered a small black coffee with a blueberry flavor shot.” Richie paused and paced across the stage.“The thing about this order is that I’m completely obsessed with it. I get plenty of strange and elaborate orders from people every day, but the thing about this coffee is that it wasn’t elaborate. It wasn’t some soy frappe one and a half shot hazelnut monstrosity, it was the most basic form of coffee, with a single totally random little add on. It was the order of a simple, regular man who has something wrong with him.”
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 39
Kudos: 339





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I saw [this](https://calmdownthehawk.tumblr.com/post/617065407742984192/adz-beercheesecasserole-adz-one-time) tumblr post and I was totally infatuated with it and also thought it would make a really hilarious reddie fic and then tumblr user @declanapologist convinced me to actually write it so here we are!
> 
> General warnings for homophobia/trauma/abuse mentions/etc. The clown is still here.

**NYC, New York, 2000**

“So, I’m a barista, right? Well, recently, I was on the job and this guy came up to order. A totally normal looking dude, about my age, dresses like some kind of underling corporate schmuck. He ordered a small black coffee with a blueberry flavor shot.” Richie paused and paced across the stage.

“The thing about this order is that I’m completely obsessed with it. I get plenty of strange and elaborate orders from people every day, but the thing about this coffee is that it wasn’t elaborate. It wasn’t some soy frappe one and a half shot hazelnut monstrosity, it was the most basic form of coffee, with a single totally random little add on. It was the order of a simple, regular man who has something wrong with him.”

This earned Richie a round of laughter and he suppressed a satisfied grin.

“I’m serious guys, this dude is fucking haunting me. I can’t sleep at night without imagining this weird little man in his cubicle sipping the only blueberry coffee in existence because who else would fucking order that. He’s got me making a serial killer board in the back of the shop except all it is is a piece of red yarn connecting a stock image of a business man and a blueberry.”

—

Richie did the blueberry man set at a few different clubs and while it definitely didn’t get as many laughs as some of his others, it was a manifestation of the fact that he couldn’t think about literally anything else. He wasn’t exactly sure what about the blueberry man had possessed him. The order was weird, sure, enough to be memorable in the constant monotony of making a million cups of coffee for harried New Yorkers every day, but not weird to the point of actually losing sleep over it. Which he did, on more than one night.

The bit about the serial killer board was true too. He had done it as a joke when his coworker had made fun of him for talking about the blueberry man nonstop for a week straight, but just because it was a joke didn’t mean that sometimes during his breaks he wouldn’t stare at it vacantly, remembering the five minute interaction he had in technicolor detail.

“There is seriously something wrong with you,” Natasha said, sliding into the back. “Stop being a freak and go out front. It’s my lunch break.”

“Aw, Tash, you know lunch breaks are an urban legend.”

“I literally don’t care. Go do your job.”

Natasha was Richie’s coworker that worked many of the same shifts that he did. She was some kind of artist who went to Pratt and lived with five roommates and she occasionally let Richie bum a cigarette even though she didn’t like him. To Richie she was the archetype of a hip New Yorker and he studied her for ways he could erase any vestiges of Northern hick in himself.

Richie stepped out of the store room and behind the bar. It wasn’t a particularly busy hour but people were coming and going. He made drinks and muttered joke ideas under his breath and occasionally tried them out on Natasha, which was mostly pointless but it was something to do. He was midway through handing someone an “iced vanilla latte for Dominic” when he looked out the window and almost dropped it.

Richie made a small black coffee with a blueberry flavor shot.

He got Natasha to switch with him so he could be at the register and before Richie knew it, the one and only blueberry man was before him once more, looking just as corporate and irritable as ever.

 _Cute!_ Richie thought dumbly.

“What can I get ya?” Richie did his best to look generically customer service friendly and not like he was meeting a celebrity.

“A small black coffee with a blueberry flavor shot.”

Richie grinned, rang him up, and then handed the coffee directly to him.

The blueberry man’s brow furrowed. “What are you doing?”

“Giving you your order,” Richie explained.

“Yeah, but I just ordered and that was sitting there on the counter.”

“Well, I remembered your order from last time you were here and remade it when I saw you come in.”

“You did what? What the hell, man? I was here _once_ like a month ago!”

“Yeah, but it was a memorable order!”

“So? I’m not a fucking regular! Who just makes a drink for a customer they’ve had once!”

“Who orders a black coffee with blueberry syrup and nothing else? Do you want the fucking coffee or not man?”

“No! I’m not going to drink whatever the fuck you just handed me. I didn’t see you make that, I don’t know what’s in it!”

“Do you make a habit of watching baristas make your order?”

“I have allergies!”

“Fine, fine, I’ll remake it.” Richie conceded, flapping his hands. “Name for the order?”

“Eddie.”

It struck Richie as a strange nickname for a grown man to use. It also suited him anyway. Richie took a sip of the rejected coffee. “This is disgusting, dude.”

“Shut up!”

Richie remade the order while Eddie glowered over the counter at him. He made a show of bowing slightly and twirling his hand before putting a single pump of blueberry syrup into the cup and Eddie rolled his eyes.

“A small coffee—” Richie started calling before Eddie swiped the coffee out of his hand and marched out of the shop.

Richie cackled and waved goodbye.

“What,” Natasha said. “The fuck, did I just witness?”

—

Eddie stormed down the street back to his office, seething incandescent rage. Who the fuck was that? Sure, Eddie acknowledged that his order was unusual but he’s ordered it _once_ , who remembers one weird order, sees that guy a second time and makes it without them asking? Who does that?

Eddie was faintly aware that it was also completely insane for a random barista to get into a fight with him. But whoever that googly eyed muppet looking motherfucker was did not hesitate to see how quickly he could drive Eddie up the fucking wall. Eddie felt like his blood was on fire. He felt fucking exhilarated. He felt more like himself than he had in, well, as long as he could remember.

When Eddie settled himself back at his desk his coffee was still mercifully hot, as it was not a particularly enjoyable drink once it had cooled down. The blueberry shot was some sort of weird private rebellion, exactly what against Eddie couldn’t pin down. It felt like something forbidden and a little dangerous, even though Eddie knew he wasn’t allergic to anything in it. It had started as the decision to push his boundaries and try something new, change up his normal order, except he had panicked and just added the first thing he saw behind the counter as an add on. It ended up being drinkable and not having any ill health effects so he counted it as a win.

What he had not expected was for the random barista who made the drink to remember it, and remember him, and also for that barista to be a total nightmare. He found himself wishing he had stopped to read the man’s name tag.

—-

A week later, Eddie went back to the cafe, totally and completely indifferent to whoever happened to be working at the time. Eddie just wanted to order his coffee in peace and go back to work. He was experiencing the full spectrum of normal coffee ordering emotions.

“You’re back!” said The Barista. “Hey, Natasha, look, my guy is back!”

“I am not your guy!” shouted Eddie from the back of the line.

Natasha, presumably, stared at Richie with something between warning and resignation.

“Aw, Nat, don’t be jealous. Just because me and Eddie fell in love at first sight doesn’t mean I won’t always have a place for you in my heart.” He tossed his hand dramatically to his chest.

“I don’t even know your name, dickwad!” Eddie cut in. “This is so not love at first sight. Also love at first sight isn’t fucking real because it doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Also even if love at first sight _was_ real there’s no way I would instantly fall in love with the most annoying barista in the tristate area.”

Eddie was now at the front of the line, having ranted his way through The Barista quickly taking the orders of the two people in front of him, all the while grinning delightedly at Eddie. Eddie looked him up and down. He was the same as the last time, tall and gangly with bad posture, messy hair and glasses that Eddie was trying to categorize as either a bold fashion choice or genuinely horrible. Judging from the prescription that magnified his eyes to cartoon proportions, Eddie assumed the latter. He made a point of finding his name tag, which read Richie.

“Compelling argument, Eds, I however, knew we would have a summer wedding the instant you ordered the world's worst coffee in the world, speaking of which, your usual?”

“Don’t call me, Eds!” Eddie felt secretly gratified that the barista remembered his name. “Also, it can’t be my usual if I’ve only ordered it twice, that’s not enough orders to form a pattern of behavior.”

“Okay, how many orders qualify a usual then? Because I think if someone orders something completely insane twice, they’re probably going to keep ordering it.”

“It’s just not a reasonable sample size, man! It’s anecdotal evidence! To have a typical order, you’d need, well, at least three but the evidence would be extremely weak.”

“Well forgive me sir, we all can’t be math majors, some of us need to keep the human species from going extinct.”

“I doubt your DNA will be entering the gene pool; I think natural selection will do us all a great service and prevent that. Also, I majored in finance, not math.”

“Oh, so an evil math major.”

The person in line behind Eddie coughed pointedly.

“Just shut up and give me my coffee,” Eddie said, feeling a prickle of shame as awareness of his surroundings filtered back into his consciousness, and handed Richie his debit card.

Richie opened his mouth looking so enormously smug that Eddie had to jump in and say, “Yeah, yeah, you know what my fucking order is,” before Richie could taunt him. This earned Eddie a fond grin from Richie, which in turn made Eddie roll his eyes and huff a suppressed laugh through his nose, an unbidden warmth spreading through his chest.

Christ.

—

In Richie Tozier’s twenty-five years of life, he had never been particularly blessed with strong impulse control or an effective brain to mouth filter. Working in the service industry had reined him in somewhat by necessity, but only by virtue of his night job of being able to go up in front of a literal audience and purge every pent up dick joke and wisecrack to drunken idiots who actually paid some nominal fee to hear it. Hecklers had always been Richie’s favorite; he always felt most alive during the back and forth of bitching out someone shouting abuse at him. After all, he had honed his comedy chops coming up with comebacks to the things shouted at him by small town bullies.

Maybe this was why he had taken such an immediate liking to Eddie. Maybe this was why years of experience at shitty jobs that taught him to bite his tongue flew out the window and suddenly Richie found himself saying every dumb thing that crossed his mind directly to him. He seemed to forget that Eddie was technically a customer and Richie suspected Eddie did as well.

But the thing was, Eddie didn’t feel like a heckler at a show, or anything remotely like a bully from Derry. Whatever it was that they did felt natural and comfortable on some level, even when they’re flying at each other's throats. After the third order of blueberry coffee, Eddie started coming into the shop pretty regularly, and Richie could expect to see him on most of his work week shifts. His appearances also got less consistently hostile, and sometimes they just joked and chatted more than they fought. They still took the shit out of each other at varying intensities, depending on the day, but it was always fun. Richie felt more like himself whenever he saw Eddie popping into the shop for his horrible coffee. Richie was standing by his stance that the coffee was horrible.

“It’s really not that bad!” Eddie insisted. The shop was empty except for the two of them, and Eddie was leaning up against the counter while Richie made his drink.

“I literally cannot fathom why you drink this shit, I tried it and it’s tastes worse than your mom’s—”

“Beep fucking beep, Richie!”

“Wow, I pity your future wife if you have such an adverse reaction to eating out.”

“It’s not the act that disgusts me, it’s that you brought my mother into it.”

“I don’t know dude, the fact that you’re calling it the act makes it seem like you find it pretty distasteful.”

“I don’t find it distasteful,” Eddie protested. “Also, fuck your pun, I’m just trying to have a polite fucking conversation.”

“You have never been polite to me once in your life. You are the rudest motherfucker I have ever met, and I’m a comedian!”

“Maybe I’m so rude because you are the rudest motherfucker that I’ve ever met!”

Richie was halfway through forming a retort when he heard the door to the back swing open and the color drained out of his face.

“Is there a problem sir?” Devin asked, stepping beside Richie.

Fuck. Richie had forgotten that the regional manager would be swinging by today and that unlike Natasha, who didn’t give a shit what Richie said or did, getting into fights with a customer would decidedly not fly with Devin. Richie watched as Eddie opened his mouth, closed it, seamlessly rearranged his features into something stupefyingly angelic for an adult man and adopted a slightly sheepish expression.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize how loud I must have gotten. I’m a regular here and I’ve got a big interview for a promotion this afternoon and Richie was hyping me up and I guess we got carried away,” Eddie lied easily.

Devin looked taken aback. “O-oh? So everything is okay?”

Eddie smiled brightly. “Yep! I hope you don’t mind me saying, but Richie is a real star here. The coffee’s good but I really just come around to talk to him if I’m being honest with myself.”

Devin blinked several slow blinks and said, “Well, okay. Have a nice day, sir, and good luck with your interview.” He then disappeared to the back.

Richie stared at Eddie slack-jawed for a full thirty seconds while Eddie’s cherubic demeanor vanished before Richie’s eyes.

“What the fuck was that?” Richie finally hissed.

“Me saving your ass from getting fired, obviously,” Eddie hissed back.

“Why?” Richie asked, sounding more genuinely baffled than he meant to.

Eddie looked legitimately distressed at the implications of Richie’s question. “Because I’m not an actual demon, Jesus Christ, I don’t want to get you fired.” Eddie flushed slightly and rolled his eyes. “Also, there’s another coffee shop that’s technically closer to my office than this one, but I always walk here.”

This tacit admission to something that Richie, by all rights, already knew, left Richie gobsmacked nonetheless. Richie shook himself slightly and recovered. He hastily conjured an outrageous smile.

“Eddie Spaghetti! You really do care!”

“Don’t tempt me into calling back your manager,” Eddie threatened, but without any real weight behind it.

“I’m gonna go to Claire’s and get those matching necklaces that say best and friend on two halves of a heart for us.”

“And I will strangle you with them.”

Richie always wrote Eddie’s name onto the cup, even if he didn’t really need to. It was the perfect opportunity to annoy him with his neverending stream of nicknames. This time though, Richie sharpied his phone number hastily onto the cup and pushed it into Eddie’s hand.

Eddie took a swig of the coffee and waved as he used his elbow to push open the door. “Seeya, Rich!”

Richie watched Eddie disappear down the sidewalk through the shop window and when he was fully out of sight, Richie sat down on the floor, put his face into his hands and groaned.

—

The thing was, Richie Tozier knew he was gay. He had known for years. He couldn’t pinpoint the exact memory of when he had admitted it to himself, but he could remember distinctly the feeling of stumbling against high school lockers after being knocked into them and hearing the word faggot spat at his feet. He could remember the moment of blinding panic that always followed, the moment of thinking they know.

He had always figured that once he left Derry it would be different. He would leave bumfuck backwater Maine and move to a major metropolitan area and he would be able to breathe. He’d meet other gay people and maybe he wouldn’t become the kind of person to march at gay pride, but maybe he could be the kind of person to hold another man’s hand in public. Maybe he wouldn’t come out to his family or his coworkers, but maybe he’d have a group of friends that all knew.

He’d been living in New York for seven years now, and he had since resigned those feelings as a pipe dream. The first time Richie went to a gay bar, at age nineteen with a fake ID, he stayed for all of fifteen minutes before he ran outside to throw up on the curb. Some guy had put his hand on his shoulder and asked him if he needed someone to call him a cab, but Richie just shrunk away and got on the subway.

The situation re: radical gay self acceptance hadn’t improved much since. He had made a pathetic last ditch effort at heterosexuality by dating a girl in his improv group for all of two weeks before he dumped her and quit the group in a panic. He had practiced the art of getting drunk before going to gay bars and staying drunk until he woke up the next day half-remembering the events of the night before and leaving before whoever drunk Richie had slept with woke up. Once or twice he had managed to even date a guy for a few weeks before coming up with some terrible excuse to dump him or making such an asshole of himself they left him.

It was a grim reality. He had never been in a serious relationship. He had no particularly close friends. So, he threw himself into trying to make comedy happen. He played every shitty club that would take him. He practiced his sets for hours in the mirror, recorded himself, listened to it back, and did it again. He auditioned for SNL and got rejected. He got some freelance work writing for late night shows. He worked double shifts at the coffee shop and walked dogs and lived with roommates he barely spoke to make rent. He figured if he couldn’t be happy, he could be successful, and show every asshole who had ever made him feel like shit that he was better than them.

This bleak acceptance of constant low level misery though had been rudely interrupted by the entrance of Eddie into his life. Richie’s cell was ringing.

“I can’t believe you wrote your number down on my cup. That is so fucking corny. Who does that, Richie, in real life? Seriously?”

“And yet you used it,” Richie hummed into the phone. “You’re just lucky I have a phone, I didn’t get one until last year when I got an agent and he made me get one.”

“I still don’t believe people pay real money to hear you talk, when you will inflict it upon anyone in a five foot radius of you for free. I’d actually be more inclined to believe people pay you to shut the hell up.”

Richie clicked his tongue disapprovingly. “You have no faith in my comedy genius, Eds. Lucky for you I am infinitely benevolent and I’ll get you front row seats when I book the Apollo, as long as you bring your mom.”

Eddie hung up.

—

Once they had exchanged phone numbers it was like the floodgates had been opened. Richie never really even thought about it, he just called Eddie constantly on random whims, to tell him a particularly horrible joke he had thought of, or try to convince Eddie that they should audition for the second season of Survivor. Eddie called him too, about anything really, most of the time Richie would pick up the phone and Eddie would already be launching into a rant about a client that had been rude to him or fully in hysterics because a pigeon took a shit on his shoe and what the fuck was he supposed to do about that. _Pigeons are sky rats, Richie._

Nothing about it struck Richie as strange. It felt normal, it felt like the natural order of the world. It wasn’t until one of Richie’s roommates asked him who he was on the phone with all the time (and to please keep it down) that it even occurred to Richie that he talked to Eddie more than he had talked to anyone since moving to New York.

The realization was somewhat embarrassing. It made Richie feel like a high schooler who was obsessed with his crush. He didn’t know why seven years of failing to experience any form of meaningful human connection had suddenly crumbled the second some guy with a weird coffee order had yelled at him at his place of employment.

But, Jesus Christ, it was nice. It was nice to see Eddie when he came by the cafe on his lunch break, it was nice to be able to pick up the phone when he was walking someone’s dog and riff back and forth with Eddie. Eddie always knew how to get a word in edgewise with Richie. When other people hummed and nodded their heads to whatever bullshit Richie was running his mouth about at any given second, Eddie always jumped in to give Richie shit or add his own idea.

“Let’s go see X-Men tomorrow!” Richie said. “The club I was supposed to perform at tomorrow got shut down for health code violations so I’m free and we could go get drinks afterwards or something.”

Eddie squinted at Richie from the other side of the counter. “Aren’t superhero movies for kids?”

“Stop giving me shit, I know you read the comics, Eds, and the grand rivalry of Professor X and Magneto transcends age.”

“Don’t call me Eds,” he huffed absently. “Yeah, I’m game. Just call me with the showtime and theatre.”

“Sweet, see you tomorrow then?” Richie passed him his cup emblazoned with Señor Spaghetti in sharpie.

Eddie flashed Richie a quick smile that stopped his heart. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Rich.”

Halfway through the door, Eddie paused and turned around. “Also, if you take me anywhere that gets closed for a health code violation in the near future I know where you work and I will end you.”

Richie barked a laugh and waved him away. “Bye, Eds!”

“I can’t believe you’re going out with Blueberry Coffee Guy,” Natasha said after the door shut behind Eddie. “Like, the murder board is still up in the back.”

“We’re not going out,” Richie protested.

“You literally just asked him out right in front of me, I have like, functioning sensory organs.”

“Can a guy not go see a movie with his friend? Have you never heard of this? Did someone tell you that you can only enter a movie theatre during a formal courtship?”

Natasha sighed. “I don’t actually care enough to argue with you about this. I’m gonna go take a smoke break.”

Natasha breezed out the back, leaving Richie alone behind the counter. Richie drummed his fingers against it and chewed his lip. Did he just ask Eddie out on a date?

—

Eddie was definitely going insane. He had woken up at 7AM on a Saturday without an alarm, and failed to fall back asleep. Without anything to do for another twelve hours, Eddie had showered, eaten breakfast, deep cleaned his apartment, showered again, disassembled and reassembled his vacuum cleaner, tried to watch TV, worked out, and showered again and it was still only 4PM.

Eddie was deeply familiar with being unbearably restless. He had always had a lot of energy, despite his health problems. His mom always said that he was bad at knowing his limits and telling when he was tired, so she always made sure he rested, even when he felt like there was nothing more appealing than running a marathon.

He wanted to call Richie, because that’s what he had started doing when he felt like this ever since Richie had given him his number, except that Eddie was fairly certain that Richie was the cause of whatever had gotten into him that day. Also, he was going to see Richie in a few hours, so it would probably be a little much to call.

It was just that Eddie was starting to process that he wanted to be around Richie constantly and it was driving him insane. He didn’t _get it_. Richie was a barista who made fun of him one time and then suddenly some switch flipped in the depths of Eddie’s subconscious and he couldn’t stay away from him. It just didn’t occur to Eddie to leave Richie alone. It’s like he took one look at him in his terrible Hawaiian shirt and decided that this man needed to be subjected to his every waking thought. It decidedly did not help that Eddie was also fairly certain that Richie had also made that his personal mission.

What was really and truly driving Eddie insane though was that none of this behavior had seemed abnormal at all to him for the past month. If anything, his life felt more normal when Richie called him out of the blue to talk about the new episode of Gilmore Girls, which he was trying to convince Eddie to watch. Sure, Eddie had some inkling that this was maybe an insane way to feel about someone he had known for all of six weeks. Eddie was on some level aware that maybe it wasn’t normal to feel like he was going to vibrate out of his skin whenever he caught Richie off guard and startled a genuine laugh out of him. But, that was the thing, his brain had just registered this as the normal way to feel about Richie, like it was the natural consequence of exposure to him.

When Eddie’s coworker had asked him if he had any weekend plans on the elevator Friday afternoon, Eddie had told him that he was going out to see a movie and get drinks.

“Wow, Kaspbrak, hot date?”

“Oh, no. I’m just going with a friend.”

“What’s her name?” His coworker waggled his eyebrows salaciously.

“Fucking Richard, man. It’s not a date.”

“Hey, it’s the 21st century now! What do I know?”

Eddie was laying on his sofa, flat on his back with arms crossed and his legs thrown over the armrest. He didn’t think Richie had asked him out on a date. They were solidly friends at this point, and asking your friend to see a movie was normal. Eddie threw up a scenario into the air above him, a version where yesterday Richie had definitely asked him out and Eddie knew it would be a date. He watched it hang there, with Eddie leaning against the counter and Richie asking him, flicking his eyes up from where he was scribbling onto Eddie’s cup. He couldn’t push the scene forward, though, he couldn’t watch it unfold, see what that Eddie would say back. It was just frozen on the asking.

Eddie checked his watch. 4:30PM. He ran a pros and cons list of ripping out his hair. He dialed Richie instead.

“Don’t tell me you’re like, insanely early,” Richie answered.

“Fuck you, dude.”

“So?”

“I don’t feel like cooking, do you wanna grab dinner with me before X Men?”

“Wow, Eds! Dinner and a movie! Way to make a boy feel special.”

“Ugh, is that a yes?”

“Where are you taking me, Edster?”

“Nowhere if you call me fucking Edster. You pick, I never eat out.”

—

Richie ended up bringing him to some hole in the wall deli near the theatre with squeaky vinyl booths and sandwiches the size of Eddie’s head.

“You said you have allergies, and the guy who runs the place has a kid with celiac so they have like gluten free options and shit.”

Eddie tipped his head up to where Richie was peeling a pair of menus off the bar. “Oh, thanks. I can eat gluten though.”

“Oh, thank god, I was about to feel so bad for you. Gluten free bread is gross.”

“Watch it, Tozier!” A fantastically bald man emerged from the back, pointing an accusatory finger at Richie. He then noticed Eddie and shifted the direction of his pointing. “Who’s this jackass? Another comic? I’m not going to introduce you to David Letterman.”

“Jesus, Harry, he’s my friend, we’re here to pay you for goods and services not milk you for industry connections. He’s a fucking risk analyist so cool your engines.”

“Yeah, yeah, go grab a booth, Shelly’ll be over in a minute.”

Richie led Eddie to an empty booth and passed him a menu encased in rubbery plastic. Eddie tapped his foot and scanned the menu, feeling overwhelmed by the choices.

“Is this some kind of comedian spot?” Eddie asked. “Is that why I got accused of wanting to be introduced to David Letterman?”

“Harry is full of shit, he is not friends with Letterman, but he tells everyone he knows him. But yeah, it’s a popular watering hole for New York comics and those who do their dark dealings with them.”

Eddie was watching the fluorescent light reflecting off the plastic menu and onto Richie’s glasses as Richie peered down his nose at the menu.

Eddie kicked Richie under the table and raised his eyebrows. “Does that make me someone doing dark dealings with a comic?”

Richie glanced up, caught off guard and pleased with it. “Absolutely. You’re my muse.”

“Your muse?”

“Yeah, man, I did a set about your fucking coffee at least five times, and then I did sets about the guy who kept coming into my shop just to fight with me on his lunch break.”

Eddie kicked him again, but this time with some force. “You start it half the time and I swear, my coffee isn’t that weird!”

“It is, dude! Where did you even get it from?”

“I don’t know, it was sort of on impulse?” Eddie trailed off. He wasn’t sure how to explain this to someone. “I guess it was an experiment. I was a sickly kid and my mom was always really freaked out about it, so she was really careful about my health. I guess I wanted to see if it would actually make me sick?”

“Hm, okay.” Richie accepted this explanation without any signs of confusion. “Have you ever had a hot pastrami?”

“I think just looking at one would raise my cholesterol.”

“So, no.” Richie waved at the sole waitress, a middle aged woman who had been ignoring them in favor of sitting on a bar stool and doing a crossword. “Shelly! Two hot pastramis, please.”

“Harry! Two hot pastramis!” she shouted at the kitchen, without getting up from her stool.

“Wow, this is the second worst customer service I’ve ever had,” Eddie said.

Richie kicked him and they both dissolved into laughter.

—

The hot pastrami did not cause any kind of allergic reaction and was delicious, even though Eddie absolutely could not finish it. He was baffled at how Richie managed to finish his. Richie just shrugged and said he has a fast metabolism and he was too lazy to eat more than one huge meal a day. Eddie then lectured him on the virtue of eating smaller, more frequent meals and Richie tried to express the incomparable joy of eating an entire pizza by yourself at 7PM as your first meal of the day. Eddie was not convinced.

“That’s definitely bad for you.”

“What? These?” Richie held up the bag of sour patch kids he was in line to purchase.

“No, well, yes, but it’s bad to only eat one huge meal a day! It’ll fuck up your metabolism and your digestion. You’re going to give yourself IBS.”

“I don’t think that’s how IBS works. Are you gonna get anything?”

“No, I just ate a monster sandwich, if I eat anything else I’ll be sick.”

“Okaaay, just don’t whine to me when I don’t let you steal my popcorn.”

—

Eddie and Richie came very close to being kicked out of the theatre. They talked through the whole movie, in the alleged whispers of two people who have never really learned to control the volume of their voice very well. They also spilled a significant amount of popcorn onto the person next to them in the struggle that ensued when Eddie decided he did actually want popcorn and he was absolutely going to steal from Richie.

Ultimately, they ended up with their arms pressed against each other and heads tipped together, to better hear the others' commentary, both eating from the half empty bag of popcorn that Richie had given up defending. There was a decided temptation, feeling full and happy and distracted, feeling the warmth of Richie’s arm flush against his, to let his head droop onto Richie’s shoulder. It was right there, after all, Richie’s stature making his shoulder the perfect height for Eddie to lean on.

In the world where Eddie knew this was a date and said yes, Eddie could see it, his head tucked against Richie, Richie with his cheek on the top of his head. Eddie studied date-world Eddie for a moment, wanting to pull him aside and interrogate him, and then waved him away to watch Wolverine growl and slash around.

—

Eddie was definitely drunk. He was elbow to elbow with Richie at the bar and Richie was also definitely drunk.

“Listen,” Richie said, karate chopping the air. “LISTEN. Magneto just has a fucking. Branding issue.”

“He has a branding issue?”

“Yeah, dude! He has a fucking BRANDING issue. I mean. He wants to stop a fucking. Mutant registry. Which is so fucked up. Like he’s RIGHT.”

“So you want him to have… A better brand?”

“Yeah! Because his fucking squad is called the Brotherhood of EVIL mutants. Like, why is he calling himself evil? He’s right!”

Eddie squinted at him, blinking slowly and blearily.

“What?” Richie asked.

Eddie hummed thoughtfully. “I agree with you which means I can’t argue with you which is fucked up because it’s fun to argue with you.”

Richie threw his head back and laughed, big and open, his shoulders shaking. Eddie kicked him and Richie tipped his head back down to look at Eddie. “You’re lucky I agree, otherwise I would’ve had you fucking blacklisted from the cafe.”

“Fucking excuse me?”

Richie bulldozed past him, grinning huge and stupid. “And you’re lucky that you’re cute.”

Richie was reaching towards his face, fingers poised to pinch him. Eddie wrestled his arm away. “Absolutely not! I am a grown fucking man, I am not cute!”

Richie was laughing, still wrestling his arm towards Eddie’s face. “You are so cute, Eds! You’re like, tiny and have big ass brown doe eyes. Like a rabid doe but still doe eyes.”

“I’m average height!” Eddie was using the last of his drunken impulse control not to bite Richie’s arm like a wild animal. “Not my fault you’re a fucking giant ass four-eyed bigfoot.”

“Cute, cute, cute!” Richie sang.

Somewhere in the tussle, the objective had gotten lost. Eddie got distracted trying to kick Richie in the shins and Richie managed to overpower Eddie’s hold on his arm, and Richie ended up with his hand on Eddie’s face, palm cupped against his cheek. Eddie leaned into the touch, his brows knit together in confusion.

Richie seemed to process what he was doing and snatched his hand away with a nervous laugh, going a bit red.

Eddie blinked and shook his head slightly, which did nothing to dissipate the ghost of warmth Richie’s hand had left on his cheek.

Eddie ordered another round of drinks.

—

Eddie finally heard the click of door unlocking and staggered into his apartment, dragging Richie in behind him by the wrist. He blindly reached around for the switch, finally flicking it on and then stumbling toward his kitchen.

He turned around to see Richie blinking dumbly in the light. “Wait… Where the fuck am I?” Richie asked.

“My fucking apartment, where the hell do you think?”

“Why… Am I here?”

“I don’t fucking know, I called a taxi and we got in and now we’re here.”

Richie nodded, his eyes closed and swaying a little bit. “Mmkay. Should I like… Get another taxi?”

“What? No.” Eddie clumsily pulled a pair of glasses from his cabinet and filled them with water from his Brita. He walked carefully back to Richie, not wanting to spill water on the floor. “We’re gonna drink some water and then go the fuck to bed so our future selves don’t hate us.”

“Mmm smart. Good plan, Spagheds. You’ve always looked out for me,” Richie mumbled, grabbing one of the glasses from Eddie’s hand, sloshing water onto the floor.

Eddie frowned at the water on the floor. “That doesn’t make any sense. We’ve known each other for like, a month and a half.”

“Yeah but also like, I think I’ve known you forever. You know?”

Eddie looked back up at Richie. “Yeah,” he said, smiling. “I do know. You’ve always looked out for me too.”

Richie clinked his glass of water against Eddie’s. “To looking out for each other, and to looking out for future Richie and Eddie!”

“Poor bastards!”

Richie laughed. “Yeah, glass of water or not, Future Richie is gonna fucking hate me.”

—

Richie fucking hated Past Richie. When Richie had first begun to float into half consciousness, he felt like he was in Derry. He was warm and comfortable, and the bedding didn’t smell like his bed in New York, they smelled like home. As he pushed into the next level of wakefulness, he honed in on the pleasant weight across his chest. This sent a jolt of terror through him that forced him the rest of the way into the land of the living. Richie opened his eyes to confirm his suspicion.

Eddie was sleeping soundly, his arm thrown over Richie’s chest and his head pillowed on his arm. His hair was messy from sleep and all the tension had gone out of his face. He looked younger and it made Richie’s heart ache. Seriously, fuck Past Richie.

Thankfully, for his own sanity and for the sake of preserving the only friendship Richie had forged in the past seven years, they were both still fully clothed. Richie considered his options. He could try to crawl out of bed without waking Eddie, but it seemed unlikely that Eddie would sleep through it. He could chicken out and pretend to be asleep, leave the job of reacting to Eddie when he woke up. He could fake surprise, jolt away from Eddie, tumble out of bed, try and laugh it off about how two bros snuggled up in bed together. He didn’t like any of them. He wanted to turn back the clock and shove his drunk ass into a taxi to his own apartment, or at least onto the couch.

Richie took too long deciding.

Eddie opened his eyes.

Neither of them moved for a long moment. Richie didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know how to explain himself. He was starting to feel nauseous.

Finally, Eddie spoke. “You look like a mole.”

“What?”

“Your eyes look so much smaller without your glasses and you’re squinting at me to see.”

Richie laughed nervously. “So I’m a mole?”

“Yep.” Eddie peeled himself off Richie and sat up. “Ugh, I can’t believe I got into bed fully clothed. Gross.”

Richie felt like he must have woken up in a different reality. “That’s what you’re concerned about?”

“Uh, yeah, Richie. I was wearing these clothes all day in fucking New York City, and then I got into my bed where I sleep with them on, who knows what kind of germs were on them, I’m gonna have to wash all my bedding.” Eddie threw his legs over the side of his bed and rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand.

Richie felt some stomach-twisting mixture of relief and disappointment. Eddie carrying on like nothing strange at all had happened was probably the best Richie could hope for, but it also made him feel like he couldn’t breathe. He sat up and started looking for his glasses.

“I’m gonna go shower, feel free to raid my kitchen,” Eddie said, pushing himself up onto his feet.

Richie found his glasses and slipped them on, blinking his eyes into focus. It was all so fucking much. Richie had finally made a friend, he had finally found who actively sought him out instead of merely tolerating him, and Richie liked him so much. Whatever was happening, whatever was swelling up, it was unbearable and Richie couldn’t stomach it.

“You, know, for a second there when I woke up, I thought I was back in the loving arms of your mom.”

Eddie groaned. “Seriously, Richie?”

“What? I was very comfortable, I felt very loved.”

Eddie crossed his arms. “You are so full of shit sometimes, you know that?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, okay?” Eddie was looking genuinely upset. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, I was drunk and I— I don’t know.”

Richie felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water on him. “Wait, shit!” Richie jumped up and crossed over to him. “That’s, uh, that’s not it. I just, I’m so fucking bad at this Eds.”

Eddie relaxed his defensive posture somewhat. “Was yesterday supposed to be a date?”

“No,” Richie answered truthfully.

Eddie tilted his head up to look him in the eyes, and Richie could feel his heart beat in his throat.

“I’d have said yes if it was.”

“Oh,” Richie said dumbly.

“Ugh, you really are bad at this,” Eddie said and grabbed Richie’s shirt, pulling him down into a kiss.

There was a moment in which Richie held stock still, his brain unable to keep up with what was happening, and Eddie started to pull away, but Richie chased him, a little frantic, hands reaching up to cup the sides of his face.

Richie felt like maybe there was too much of him in the kiss, like it was becoming embarrassingly desperate, too intense, too hungry, but then Eddie took his lip between his teeth and any remaining capability for coherent thought escaped him, along with a noise that was deeply undignified.

Eventually, after what was either a minute or an hour, they pulled apart. Eddie was red-faced and breathing hard, his hair still messy from sleeping and now worse from Richie pushing his fingers through it, and he had a defiant glint to his eye that Richie was sure would be the end of him.

Richie’s brain was absolutely still not working. “Cool!” he said.

Eddie started laughing, a little incredulously, and dropped his forehead onto Richie’s shoulder. He slid his arms around Richie’s waist and said, “I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

“I’m okay with that,” Richie said. “I don’t know either.”

Eddie lifted his face back up and Richie kissed him again, smiling into it. Eddie let Richie back him against a wall and then Eddie’s mouth found the place where Richie’s jaw met his neck.

“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.”

—

Eddie’s life in many ways was unchanged. He still went to work and desperately contained his anger from his coworkers and his clients. He still did all his meal prep on Sunday evenings. He still took his temperature every morning out of habit. But now he had Richie, who had quietly fit himself into every lonely corner of his life. Tense and boring conversations in the breakroom during his lunch break had been replaced with lingering at the coffee shop with Richie, picking fights and laughing at each other over the counter. The occasional coworker inviting him out for drinks and Eddie nursing a single beer until he could find an excuse to leave had become letting Richie drag him around the city to little dive bars and hole in the wall restaurants, and Eddie quietly conceding to himself more and more of his food rules. Restlessly channel flipping alone in his apartment now became wrestling matches for the remote that were more an excuse for Eddie to climb into Richie’s lap than anything else.

It had only been about two weeks since they had kissed, but Eddie felt like his life made sense now in a way it hadn’t before he met Richie. Neither Eddie or Richie had made any attempt to label whatever they were doing, but Eddie wasn’t sure he wanted to, or even could. He hadn’t really let himself think about what it meant to him that Richie was a man, he just focused on the fact that it was Richie. He just knew that when they were together it was easy, that it felt right.

In a distant way, Eddie was aware that whatever was happening was happening very quickly. Maybe it was a function of neither of them seeming to have many other friends, or maybe a function of being weird intense people, he couldn’t say. Sometimes, when he was around Richie, he had this overwhelming feeling that something was on the tip of his tongue, except instead of a lost word or name, it was something huge.

Richie stayed the night almost more often than he didn’t. A heat wave had chased Richie into Eddie’s apartment for the past few nights. The other day Eddie had pointed out that Richie looked exhausted and Richie explained that he hadn’t been sleeping well because he lived on the 6th floor of an unairconditioned walk up. Eddie told him to just bring a fucking toothbrush over already. Eddie didn’t know or care whether Richie was angling for this response; he was perfectly happy to take advantage of any convenient excuse to wake up next to Richie.

For some reason, even though Richie was supposedly staying at his apartment for the air conditioning, he still seemed intent on dragging him out of it. Specifically, he seemed to be intent on dragging Eddie outside whenever he started doing something like reorganizing his file cabinet for a second time because he couldn’t hold still or when Richie seemed particularly frustrated with the ratty notebook he wrote his sets in. This was how they ended up in the park near Eddie’s house, feeling the heat radiate off the earth and pavement.

Richie spotted a man selling popsicles and jogged over to him. He came back with two and plopped down on the bench next to Eddie. “Una paleta de mango para ti.”

“Your accent is terrible.”

“Tragically, high school Spanish taught by someone who studied abroad in Spain for a semester failed to teach me the finer details of proper pronunciation.”

It was brutally humid. New York summers were terrible like that, sweltering and suffocating. Eddie wasn’t sure exactly how Richie had convinced him to leave his air conditioned apartment, but he wasn’t sure a popsicle had been worth it.

“Did you know that New York City is subtropical?” Eddie said.

“Bullshit. It gets way too fucking cold to be tropical.”

“I’m serious! You can look it up. The city and Long Island are both subtropical. Which is why I feel like I’m about to get a fucking heat stroke.”

“You’re not going to get a heat stroke. It’s like 85 out.”

“People have gotten heat stroke in 85 degree weather.”

“Yeah, like marathon runners and old people, not twenty-five year olds sitting on their asses eating ice cream.” Richie bumped his shoulder against Eddie’s. “Lemme try yours.”

“What? No!”

“Why not?” Richie whined.

“Germs, dude!”

“Eddie.”

“What?”

“My tongue has literally been inside your mouth.”

Eddie shot him a withering glare, but tipped his popsicle toward Richie, who proceeded to try to shove the whole thing in his mouth.

Eddie jabbed the popsicle to the back of his throat in retaliation and Richie reeled away coughing and saying something about Eddie being a little fucking demon. Eddie grinned and reached over to take a bite of Richie’s popsicle.

Richie recovered and clicked his tongue thoughtfully to the roof of his mouth. “Mango is so good but I don’t really like how it makes your mouth feel, you know?”

“How it makes your mouth feel?”

“Yeah, like, it makes your tongue tingle and your throat kinda itchy.”

“Oh my god.”

“What?”

“Richie, you’re fucking allergic to mango!”

“What? No I’m not!”

“Yes, you totally are! You just described having an allergic reaction to me!”

“Are you saying mango doesn’t give you the mouth tingles?”

“No! Richie, how many foods that you eat have been giving you the fucking mouth _tingles_?”

Richie opened his mouth and closed it, and then gazed skyward, deep in thought. Eddie put his head in his hand.

“Okay, so, pineapple—” Richie’s phone went off in his pocket and he fished it out. “Oh, I have to take this, sorry.”

Richie got up and walked around to stand behind the bench. Eddie closed his eyes and tipped his head back, the backs of his eyelids glowing red in the sun. He peered down at his popsicle, which was melting, sticky orange liquid oozing down the stick and covering his fingers. _Me too, buddy_ , Eddie thought. It did genuinely gross Eddie out to share a popsicle, but he couldn’t argue Richie’s logic and resumed eating it, to stem the flow of melted popsicle onto his hand if nothing else.

“Seriously? Holy shit!” Richie said into his phone. Eddie’s ears pricked up and he twisted a bit on the bench to watch him. “Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, this could be huge. I’m all in. Okay! Talk to you soon!”

Richie clicked his phone off and slid it back into his pocket. “Holy shit,” he said under his breath.

“Who was it?” Eddie asked.

Richie was staring into the middle distance. “My agent.”

Eddie quirked an eyebrow. “What was it about?”

“I got cast in a show.” Richie shook his head and jumped back onto the bench next to him. “Holy shit, Eds! I got like a real character! I can quit my day job!”

“Oh!” Eddie wrapped Richie in a hug, careful not to drip popsicle onto him. “Congrats, Richie!”

They stayed like that for a moment, even though hugging was horrifyingly warm in the heat, and then Eddie felt Richie suddenly tense and pull away. Richie’s features had been drawn tight into something pained and stricken.

“What’s wrong?”

Richie swallowed and looked to the side. “I have to move to LA.”

“Oh,” Eddie said. A weight settled itself in Eddie’s chest. It felt hard to breath. “Okay.”

Richie didn’t say anything. He just finished his popsicle in horrible silence, not even making eye contact.

Eddie couldn’t stand it. “Can we go back to my apartment?” he snapped. “I’m going to have a fucking heat stroke.”

Eddie didn’t wait for a response, he just got up and started walking. Probably faster than he meant to but he felt like he was suffocating and he needed to get out of the fucking heat.

—

Back in his apartment, Eddie furiously and methodically washed the melted popsicle off his hands in his kitchen sink. Richie was slumped against the counter next to him, his arms crossed. He was too still, his normal foot tapping and gesticulation replaced with a sullen lethargy. It pissed Eddie off.

“So, when are you moving?” Eddie heard himself saying.

“I don’t know. My agent said he’d call me back with the details later.”

“Okay.”

Eddie felt like he should have expected this. He felt like an idiot. Like he should’ve known that this was too good to be true, too good to last. Eddie had never been the kind of person that had had things just work out for him. Nothing had ever been easy for Eddie, he didn’t know why he had bothered hoping this would be different.

“This isn’t,” Richie started. “This isn’t fucking fair. I mean, I just— I finally— We finally—” Richie cut off with a frustrated huff. “I hate this.”

Eddie turned off the water and pulled the hand towel off the oven handle.

“I don’t think I can do this. Maybe I should say no,” Richie said.

Something bright and desperate started banging around in Eddie’s ribcage and he willed it still. Eddie turned to face him. “No, absolutely not.”

“I mean, the New York comedy scene is full of other opportunities and we’re finally together.” Richie swallowed. “I don’t want to lose this.”

The air conditioning had done nothing to solve the hot choking feeling that had become all encompassing. “No. Richie, we’ve been together for two weeks. You’re not turning this down because of this.” Eddie gestured helplessly at the air between them.

“You know that’s fucking bullshit, Eds. It’s not that simple.”

Eddie wanted it to be. He wanted Richie to stay, or he wanted to move to fucking LA with him, but he shouldn’t, or maybe he couldn’t. He had a job, it paid well, and he couldn’t justify moving cross country for someone he’d known for a summer, even if it felt like he was cutting off his arm. He knew they both had cell phones, that maybe they could call and try to work something out, but some part of him knew that being in different cities meant the end. “This isn’t going to work.”

Richie’s stupor had been replaced with desperation. He grabbed Eddie’s wrist. “Eddie, I—”

“Don’t,” Eddie warned. “Richie, don’t. I can’t fucking handle that.”

Richie dropped his hand like he had been burned and stepped back. It was the worst thing Eddie had ever seen.

Eddie closed his eyes and took a long shaky breath. He couldn’t look at Richie, because he knew if he looked he would do something crazy. “Richie, you need to leave.”

“Eddie.”

“Please leave.”

Eddie couldn’t open his eyes. He just stood there, holding himself desperately still, until he heard his apartment door click shut.

He finally opened his eyes, blinking a few times to clear them. He took one step back against his counter and slid to the floor. He felt dizzy and sick, reeling, trying to process what he had done in just a few minutes, what he had done in the past few weeks, few months. He felt like he had turned his entire life upside down and then flipped it back over, except now he knew what the other side looked like. He tried being angry at Richie, for making him happy, for showing him what he was missing, for listening to him when he pushed him away, but all he could summon was a feeling like his chest was caving in.

—

The next day Eddie put everything Richie had left lying around his apartment in a shoebox. His toothbrush, a tee shirt and a dollar store notebook. He wasn’t sure how long he should wait to see if Richie would call to ask for it back before he threw it out, so he put the box in his closet where he wouldn’t have to look at it. Two weeks later he forgot it was there.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie hit the gong and two seconds later he was pretty sure that everything in his life must have been conspiring against him, culminating in this moment of utter horrible lunatic stupidity. Eddie was standing across the room from him.
> 
> “Blueberry—” Richie started. “Oh my fucking god of course it was you!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! This took much longer than I ever anticipated it taking, but it is here! To everyone who toughed it out all summer, thank you for being patient with me. 
> 
> Some warnings for this chapter are: a single use of the f slur, references to homophobic bullying, passive suicidal ideation, and very vague references to Bev's abuse with some parallels to Eddie.

**Derry, Maine, 2016**

Richie wasn’t exactly sure what to expect when returning to Derry. He hadn’t been back since he left for college, his parents had moved, and he had no— Well, apparently he did have a friend who was still in Derry, Mike Hanlon. He could barely remember him. Whenever he tried too hard to remember how he knew him, what they used to do together, his mind would drift and slide off course.

Being in Derry helped. While he drove to Jade of the Orient, wisps of memories floated in and out of his head. He had biked down these streets more times than he could count. Usually with his… He had friends, friends in the plural. Richie gripped the steering wheel tighter as if his grip on the wheel could stop the unraveling of what he understood to be true of himself for the past twenty-some years. A dim flickering affection was coming to life inside him, for faces and names he couldn’t remember. 

When he saw Ben Hanscom and Beverly Marsh it was like being hit by a truck, if a truck was memories of smoking cigarettes in an underground bunker with Bev while Ben puttered around with a toolkit, making cow eyes at Bev when he thought no one was looking. Also, Ben was hot now which was fucked up.

“You two look amazing. What the fuck happened to me?”

—

Richie hit the gong and two seconds later he was pretty sure that everything in his life must have been conspiring against him, culminating in this moment of utter horrible lunatic stupidity. Eddie was standing across the room from him.

“Blueberry—” Richie started. “Oh my fucking god of course it was you!”

“Oh, holy shit,” Eddie said and turned to Bill. “You mean to tell me that Richie was  _ Richie _ the whole fucking time?”

Bill looked alarmed. “Yes?”

Richie had moved to grab Beverly by the shoulders. He had only just remembered her existence five minutes ago, but he trusted her instantly. “Bev. Bev. Blueberry Eddie is fucking Eddie Kaspbrak.”

“Richie, I don’t know what that means.”

“It means!” Richie whirled to face Eddie and point at him. “This motherfucker orders black coffee with blueberry syrup and nothing else! Because of course! Of course, only Eddie would come up with shit like that!”

“That doesn’t explain anything, Richie,” Bill said.

“I can’t believe that fucking Richie was  _ Richie Tozier _ the whole time!  _ The whole time, Bill! _ ” Eddie screeched. 

“Guys! Can we settle down,” Mike interrupted. “I know that, uh, we’re all remembering many things right now and it’s overwhelming, so let’s all sit down and eat.”

Richie thought that “many things” was the understatement of the fucking Millenium considering he was suddenly remembering he had not grown up a strange, friendless child, he had instead been a strange child with a group of strange, dear friends. On top of this, he was also suddenly remembering the worst fucking heartbreak of his life, and the fact that it had not been, as he had previously believed, an intense whirlwind summer romance with someone he only knew for a short time, no, it had been with his motherfucking childhood best friend that he had been in love with before he even knew what that meant. What the fuck. Somewhere in his periphery, Richie could see Eddie emphatically karate-chopping his hand while saying something very loudly to Bill while Mike steered him into a chair with a firm hand on his shoulder.

Richie felt a hand on his shoulder. “You okay, Rich?” Ben asked gently. It was still fucked up that Ben was hot now.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m good,” he replied airily. “It’s just that Eddie ordered blueberry coffee from me once and then it consumed my entire life for a summer.”

“Still don’t know what that means, but okay.” Ben gave his shoulder a quick squeeze and then sat down at the table.

No one objected when Richie ordered a round of shots.

“Okay, before alcohol gets here and you two become completely intolerable, one of you, please explain without shouting, why you are screaming about blueberry coffee," Beverly asked.

“This is so stupid.” Eddie sighed heavily. “So, like fifteen fucking years ago I ordered blueberry coffee from Richie because he worked at the cafe near my office and then he wouldn’t fucking leave me alone about it and we…” Eddie glanced at Richie, and Richie twitched his head slightly to the side. “We hung out all summer until Richie moved to L.A.”

“So, you two stayed in touch after you left Derry?” Mike asked, his brows knit together.

Eddie’s mouth pressed into a hard line. “Uh, no. I didn’t actually remember…” Eddie trailed off.

Because that was it, wasn’t it. Richie had somehow briefly dated the love of his fucking life without realizing it. He didn’t remember jack shit about his life apparently. He had always known his memory of his childhood was hazy, but he always figured it was because it was boring and unpleasant. He would have never guessed the extent to what he had forgotten. Richie had built his life on the unstable foundation of the scraps of himself he could remember, not even a skeleton of himself, just loose pieces.

If Richie had known, if he’d remembered, he wouldn’t have let go. He would’ve chained himself to Eddie’s fucking radiator and told Eddie to suck it up because like it or not, there was no getting rid of him. Richie was feeling a blinding sort of pressure build in his chest. Eddie had been his Eddie, and Richie had already been in love with him for years when he walked into the coffee shop. He felt possessed with a crazy urge to launch himself across the seat between them and kiss Eddie with all their friends, God, and the assorted patrons of the Chinese restaurant as witnesses.

Richie turned to him in time to see Eddie grab the glass of water in front of him, a wedding band glinting on his finger. Richie felt the air go out of him as he plummeted back to reality.

Luckily for Richie, as the earth came up to meet him, a tray of shots arrived to cushion his fall. He swallowed the liquor quickly, neglecting to use his hands just to be annoying, and focused on the heat in his throat to clear his head. He could do this. He could drink and make rude jokes and reminisce and then book the next flight back to LA as soon as he got back to his hotel room. His shot glass dropped unceremoniously onto the table.

"So, wait, Eddie, you got married?" his mouth asked.

He was fucked.

—

Richie was definitely fucked, though at least it seemed like he might at survive dinner. Despite being entirely unable to restrain himself from identifying and attacking as many of Eddie's sore spots as he could find, he was saved by this behavior seeming entirely unremarkable to his friends. It got lost within the general rowdiness of the table, as everyone continued to drink, continued to laugh and shout and rib and reminisce.

A familiar voice cut through the din. “Seriously, guys? You leave one empty seat open for me and it’s between Eddie and Richie?”

Richie whipped around to see Beverly already out of her seat and flying towards Stan with her arms outstretched. “You made it!” she crowed, slinging her arms around his neck.

“Hey, Beverly,” Stan said, reaching up to hug her back.

Beverly pulled away, so she was holding Stan by his shoulders. “It’s so good to see you, Stan,” she said, blinking and looking a little bright-eyed.

Richie twisted in his seat, moving to crack wise about Beverly’s dramatic welcome, but faltered when he got a better look at Stan. Stan was smiling, but he was deathly pale with stark dark circles under his eyes, and he was trembling slightly even with Beverly’s steadying grasp. 

Richie slid into the seat next to Eddie. “All better!” he sing-songed. “Now both of you can sit next to me. Remember that shit? How we used to fight over who we wanted to sit next to like in the second grade?”

“I’m pretty sure we were fighting over who got to sit next to Bill, not you,” Eddie added.

“Yeah, but Bill was the tallest and now I’m like a foot taller than him, so I’m the cool one.”

“Hey!” Bill protested at the same time as Eddie said, “That is not how that works!”

Stan shook his head at Richie, but he was still smiling. “It’s been a while, Trashmouth.”

Another whirlwind of memories hit Richie like a brick. “Oh fuck! That’s where my stage name came from!”

This sent a ripple of laughter around the table as Stan and Bev sat down. Richie was still watching Stan out of the corner of his eye. He looked bad, despite smiling wryly and bobbing his head along as everyone caught up and happily brought up memories. Staring at Stan’s wan profile, what Richie found himself remembering were the times in high school when Stan would go days without sleeping. He remembered how when it got really bad the only way they could get him to sleep was by dragging him down to the clubhouse and shoving him in the hammock. They would let him drift off to the sound of Richie and Mike arguing over the music and Richie and Eddie arguing about everything else. Richie had the terrible, nagging feeling of missing something crucial about these memories. Something that explained why Stan didn’t sleep, or why when it stormed they all tended to show up unannounced at Bill's to crowd into his basement and watch movies together on the projector. It was an itchy feeling like something was on the tip of his tongue.

"Hey," Richie said. "Does anyone remember how Eddie broke his arm?"

There was a beat of silence in which everyone furrowed their brows and clicked their tongues in thought, but before anyone could arrive at an answer, the bowl of fortune cookies erupted into a flurry of horrors. 

—

Richie sat on the foot of his hotel bed idly flipping channels, hoping vainly that his head would stop spinning with not only the events of the evening but the unearthing of a lifetime of memories as well. They wouldn’t stop coming was the problem, it was like tugging a loose thread and unraveling the entire sweater. Richie’s understanding of the world, of himself, was on a swiftly tilting axis and he was desperately trying to keep his footing.

Somewhere in the depths of his psyche, his teenage self and twenty-five-year-old self had locked themselves in a cage match, which went something along the lines of his seventeen-year-old self pouncing on his twenty-five-year-old self and screaming,  _ we dated Eddie?! _ directly in his face and twenty-five-year-old Richie screaming,  _ Eddie was our childhood best friend?! _ back. Forty-year-old Richie wanted to throttle the both of them.

He should have left. They all should have agreed to high tail it out of Derry the minute they remembered the clown, and shoved Mike into the back of a van and dragged him out if need be. But unfortunately, Mike was very tall and jacked for reasons beyond Richie's comprehension given that he was apparently a librarian, and kidnapping him would probably prove very difficult.

Ultimately, it was Stan who convinced them to stay, even with his voice shaking and his hands trembling. He squared his shoulders and crossed his arms and told them with all the conviction of a stern grandfather that, "Twenty-seven years ago when I almost got eaten in a sewer, you guys promised you would never let anything bad happen to me. I really don't want to be here, I'm fucking terrified, but we were only able to stop Pennywise together. So, I came, and I'm holding you all to that promise. If any of you let me die in a sewer, my wife has permission to exact revenge."

"Stan, we should just go," Eddie said.

"We can't," Stan protested, sounding a little shrill. "If we leave, Mike or Bill or both of them are still going to go after It and they'll die. You know they will!"

Mike and Bill looked a little shocked and almost chastened, but before either of them could protest Beverly stepped over to grab Stan's hand. "Stanley's right. We only stand a chance with all of us," she said with grave authority. "If anyone leaves, we doom whoever we leave behind."

"Okay, so we all leave," Richie said. "Problem solved."

"If we all leave, we doom the children of Derry," Mike said.

There was a moment of silence then, as Mike's words floated down from the air to lay heavy on their shoulders.

Eddie broke the silence, barely audible. "Why does it have to be us?" he asked.

"Because if we don't do it, no one else will," Miked replied, not bitterly or resentfully; he simply acknowledged what they all knew, whether they wanted to admit it or not.

So they stayed. They checked out six rooms at the desolate Derry Townhouse, bid each other goodnight with tight-lipped smiles, and then retreated to their rooms to brace themselves for what tomorrow would bring.

Richie felt uneasy thinking about Stan alone in his hotel room. There was something wrong. It wasn't hard to read, and it was made easier because he had known Stan since he was still wetting the bed. The mounting unease eventually pushed Richie off his bed and out into the hall. He rapped his knuckles on Stan's door.

"Richie? Is there something wrong?" Stan asked, opening the door and assessing the worried notch between Richie's brows.

"You haven't slept since Mike called, have you?" Richie asked.

Stan’s eyes widened, and he grimaced. "No."

"Thought so. Lemme in." Richie pushed past Stan before he could refuse and grabbed the remote off the table before sitting down on Stan's bed.

"Richie, what are you doing?"

"I'm hanging out with you, duh, I'm not just going to let you putter around your room alone all night. You look like hell, man, no offense."

Stan crept back to his bed and sat up against the headboard. He raised an eyebrow at Richie. "You're trying to put me to sleep, aren't you?"

"That makes it sound like I'm trying to euthanize you. Also, yeah, you need some rest if we're going to kill the fucking clown."

It had been a long time, Richie realized, since he had taken care of anybody. It felt sort of like flexing a disused muscle. Something that was once instinctual but had atrophied over time. It had been years since he'd had anyone to care about. But this was Stan; Richie knew the motions even with the distance time had put between them. He flicked on the TV and turned on Catfish for some background noise and then scooched himself up next to Stan, an inane quip about the show already halfway out of his mouth. They watched like that for a while, slumped side by side in the dingy bed, Richie commentating on the various twists and turns of the bad reality TV.

Halfway through the second episode, Stan tipped his head up to look at Richie. "Thanks, Rich," Stan murmured. "I didn't really want to be alone."

"Yeah, I figured. Wanna tell me about accounting? Or your wife? Or whatever new grandpa hobbies you've acquired since we've last seen each other."

"I think if I tell you about accounting you'll be the one falling asleep."

"Okay.” Richie grinned and put his chin in his hands, batting his eyelashes sarcastically. “So, tell me about Mrs. Urine."

“Richie!” Stan hissed, swatting at his arms. “It’s Blum-Uris, we hyphenated.” Stan looked down and smiled, his face easing into something warm. "Her name is Patty, we met in college at a party. I think I knew she was the one right away."

"Gross."

"Beep beep. We got married young, I never even really dated anyone else, never wanted to. She's a teacher, a good one, the kids love her."

"You never had any kids of your own, though?" Richie asked. 

Stan’s face fell. "We tried. Doctors couldn't find anything wrong, but it never happened. We were looking into adoption or fostering actually before Mike called."

"Oh." Richie found it strange to think about any of them with kids, for some reason, but he thought Stan would be a good dad. "Good luck." 

"Thanks, Richie," Stan said sincerely. "How about you, do you have anyone back in LA? And don't say my mom."

“Well, Mrs—”

“Or Eddie’s mom,” Stan cut him off. 

Richie rolled his eyes. "No, I don't really do that." Stan frowned, his eyebrows tipping into a look of pity that made Richie's skin crawl. "I'm glad you found true love or whatever, but the Trashmouth can't be tied down, Stanley, I gotta live wild and free." Richie waggled his eyebrows, but Stan offered Richie no mercy.

"What's going on with you and Eddie?" he asked point blank.

Richie blinked. "What?"

"You two are acting weird around each other, weirder than normal."

Richie swallowed, glancing sideways at Stan and wishing he could pry open his head and see exactly what he meant by  _ weird _ . He wished they could go back to talking about Stan’s wife, he didn’t want to tell Stan about his life, and he really didn’t want to tell Stan about Eddie. "I don't know what you mean. It’s probably just because I haven’t seen him in years and also just remembered he exists like, a couple of hours ago," Richie said to the TV.

"Stop playing dumb, Richie." 

Richie hooked his hand around the back of his neck and scratched at it. He considered various evasive or outrageous things to say, but when he saw the set of Stan’s brow he knew that there was no escaping whatever conversation Stan had decided that they were having. He sighed heavily. "I don't know what you want me to say."

"You know I love you no matter what, right?" Stan said plainly.

Richie groaned and put his face in his hands. That was the thing with Stan. He could always see straight through Richie, right past the smoke and mirrors, and into the fucking viscera. It was awful. Richie had never been able to hide shit from Stan. If Richie kept secrets from him, it was only because Stanley rarely pried and would rather Richie tell him himself. It was the only thing that made it bearable for Richie. It was bad enough knowing that Stan always knew everything, but at least Stan rarely made him say it. He reluctantly took his face out of his hands.

"See! When you say shit like that, Stan, you might as well just tell me you know, because now I know you know, you're just being nice and trying to let me say it for myself. But now you've cornered me between honesty and pretending like I don't know you know, and that you don't know I know you know, so you might as well just say it!" Richie said in one horrible breath. 

Stan leaned away to give him more space. "Richie, it's okay. You don't have to tell me anything you don’t want to."

Richie’s voice had taken on a slightly frantic edge. "You're making it worse! Can't you just ignore me and pretend like it's not been obvious since I hit puberty?"

"It's not obvious, Rich, I just know you."

"Uh-huh, and apparently, so did every bully in Derry." 

"They said things like that to all of us."

Richie crossed his arms. It was true; Richie had not been the sole victim of homophobic bullying amongst his friends, but at least for them, none of them had to look their bullies in the eyes knowing what they were saying was true. Talking around it was starting to drive Richie insane, it made him feel like screaming, like tattooing it onto his forehead and just getting it all over with. But he couldn’t say it, not yet, not in words he couldn’t come back from. He scrambled for something he could say, enough of a truth that Stan would lay off, enough of an admission that he would feel less like a faulty pressure cooker doomed to explode.

"I dated Eddie," he said to his legs. He couldn’t bring himself to watch Stan’s reaction.

Stan tipped his head onto Richie's shoulder. "I thought so."

"What?” Richie whipped his head around so quickly it almost hurt. “What do you mean you thought so? You weren't even there when we were screaming at each other about the fucking coffee!"

"Senior year, right? That's when I picked up on it at least."

"What."

"Even earlier?"

"We didn't date in high school!" Richie exclaimed, incredulous. 

"Oh." Stan furrowed his brow. "Are you sure?"

"What the fuck, man, I think I'd know if I was dating Eddie in high school."

"When did you date then? In middle school? Does that even count?"

"We were twenty-five, Stan! It was for like a couple of weeks and then he dumped me and I moved to LA. We thought we didn't know each other."

"He dumped you?" Stan seemed genuinely confused. "Why?"

Richie wanted to bury his face in his hands. This was all so fucking mortifying. Stan had of course lovingly cornered him into coming out to someone for the first time in his life. Like the weird fucking grandpa he was. On top of this, Richie now had to explain that he'd begged Eddie, his not-boyfriend of a few weeks to let Richie throw away a huge break for his career to stay in New York with him. It was horrible. It was embarrassing. It was such a sad honest testament to the desperate loser he was and had always been.

Richie huffed. "I got a job in LA and he didn't want to do long distance," he grumbled. It was most of the truth. "Anyway, it was fifteen years ago and he's married now so it doesn't matter."

"You still love him," Stan said. It wasn't a question, it was a statement.

"I just said it was fifteen years ago and we only dated for a few weeks,” Richie said. It was a statement, not an answer.

"Well, I also just said I thought you two must have been dating in high school from the way you acted around each other."

"I still don't know why you thought that!"

Stan raised his eyebrows. "Richie, I know we're just getting our memories back now, but I'm not an idiot."

"Maybe I am!"

Stan rolled his eyes. "You two were glued at the hip, Rich! You were always together, and when you weren't you were both moping about it. And the staring! The fucking staring, Richie, it was unbearable. You were such teenagers I thought you might actually throw up from lovesickness."

"Eddie was like that too?"

"Yes. It was horrible. You were both insufferable for almost all of high school, but senior year was the worst of it."

Richie felt wholly caught off guard by this. He supposed it made some degree of sense; he had concrete evidence that Eddie had at least at some point liked him, even if he didn’t remember who he was. But he had spent all of high school in the throes of hopeless pining; it was hard to recontextualize those memories with the knowledge that maybe it hadn’t been so hopeless. 

Still, even with this, it didn't matter. "Okay, but that was high school, Stan. We're forty."

"I know you, Richie,” Stan said. 

"I know, it's the worst."

Stan smiled and shook his head. "For what it's worth, I think Eddie still looks at you like he's a teenager."

Pain twisted in Richie's chest. "Don't say that."

Stan studied him a moment, with his frustratingly perceptive eyes. "Okay,” he said. 

They lapsed into silence, before Richie's eye got caught again by the episode of Catfish that had been playing in the background and returned to his commentary. Stan started to list to the side as Richie and the TV droned on, his eyes fluttering open and shut.

"I missed you," Stan said.

"Missed you too, Stan the Man," Richie said, and was almost surprised with the intensity of that truth. He loved Stan fiercely, still, after all these years, like they had never been apart. It felt good, it felt good to have friends he cared about. Richie hadn't known how badly he'd missed this until it was shoved right back under his nose.

Stan finally seemed to drop off to sleep.

  
  


—

Richie let himself quietly out of Stan's room and crept out into the hall, only to find Eddie standing in front of his own door with his arms crossed, scowling.

"Fine! Ignore me," Eddie huffed to the door. "See if I care."

"Uh, Eddie?" Richie interrupted. 

Eddie whipped around to face him, looking completely horrified. "Richie!"

"Did you just chew out an empty hotel room thinking I was ignoring you?"

"No," Eddie lied obviously, turning an alarming shade of red. "Why weren't you in your room?"

"I was hanging out with Stan."

"Oh, okay." Eddie stared at him intensely for an uncomfortable beat, looking like he was trying to psychically communicate with him. Finally, he deflated a little and asked, "Can we talk?"

"Actually, I was thinking I'd rather go sit in my hotel room in dead silence while you bitch at me through the door."

"Oh, fuck you," he grumbled. "Seriously, Rich, can we talk?"

Richie tucked his hands into his pocket and leaned his arm against the wall. "What about?"

Eddie made an elaborate show of waving his hands vaguely and avoiding eye contact. “How we… That summer.” Eddie swallowed and crossed his arms. “I’m sorry.”

Richie felt a twist of satisfaction chased immediately by a flash of shame. “It’s fine, man, don’t worry about it. We…” Richie paused and then hazarded, “dated, for like a month or something in our twenties, and then broke up because of distance. It’s not a big deal.”

“Right. Of course,” Eddie said tightly. Richie wondered if it was wishful thinking or if Eddie genuinely looked disappointed.

“Besides, look at you, you have a wife! And it’s only exactly as Oedipal as I would predict.”

“Get fucked, Richie,” Eddie said, but it lacked any real heat and Eddie seemed strangely abashed.

In the end, whatever sick satisfaction Richie got from making Eddie squirm for dumping him was vastly outweighed by a lifetime of hating making Eddie genuinely upset. Richie was still a little dizzy from his conversation with Stan, with the relief of friendship.

“We were best friends our entire childhood, I don’t think that’s canceled out by knowing what your dick looks like.”

Eddie flushed and rolled his eyes with his entire head. “You really never learned how to hold a normal conversation, even after all these years?”

“I will die like this.”

Eddie shook his head, the same familiar exasperated way he had since they were kids. He looked up at him, his smile a little fond, a little sad. “It’s good to see you, Rich, I missed you.” Eddie raised his arms slightly, a question.

Fuck it, Richie thought. “Bring it in, Eds.”

Richie wasn’t sure if he even meant to try and make the hug brief and friendly, because without a single thought he found himself holding Eddie flush against himself, and felt Eddie's arms wrapped tight around his back. The pain was exquisite and Richie savored it greedily.

Eventually, whatever broken self-preservation instincts he had left kicked in and he pulled away, clapping Eddie on the shoulder like that did anything to mitigate the tenderness of their embrace.

"Alright, I'm gonna turn in, can't fight evil clowns without my beauty sleep," he said. "G'night, Eddie."

Eddie's expression remained difficult to parse. "Night, Richie," Eddie replied.

Richie smiled and waved, and then slipped back into his hotel room, resigning himself to a sleepless night.

—

Eddie crossed his arms and took a long breath in through his nose and out through his mouth, working his jaw and drumming his fingers on his bicep. He wasn’t sure what he even wanted from that conversation. By all rights, that was the best version of the conversation he could hope for. Richie was right, it was one summer fifteen years ago, Eddie was married, and most importantly, they had a fucking clown to kill. Eddie shook himself. He was just glad to have his friend back.

There was the click and whine of a door opening behind him, and Eddie turned around to see Bev slipping out into the hall. “Oh, Eddie,” she said, noticing him.

“Fresh air?” Eddie asked.

Bev nodded. “You too?”

“Something like that.”

Bev smiled. “Join me?”

Bev waited the moment it took for Eddie to join her down the hall, and they headed outside together.

Of all the Losers, Bev was probably the one Eddie had spent the least time with. Not for any dislike of her, but she was the first of them to leave Derry, moving away at the end of the summer before high school started. In the summer they were friends, Eddie hadn’t vied particularly hard for her attention the way Bill or Ben did, or even Richie, who seemed to quickly fall into a natural rhythm with her. If anything, Eddie had been more liable to try and peel Richie away from Bev for himself, a fact that Eddie was uncomfortably realizing now.

Bev dropped down to sit on the curb of the parking lot and Eddie settled down next to her. Bev fished a cigarette and lighter from her pocket, cupping them against the wind to light it. Eddie bit back lung cancer statistics and Bev raised her eyebrows at him because she could tell what he was thinking. Recollections of bitching out Richie for smoking under the bleachers filtered back into Eddie’s memories.

“Oh shit!” Eddie exclaimed. “You’re the one who gave Richie the nicotine addiction!”

Bev grimaced. “I did?”

“Yeah, he smoked all through high school and whenever I told him off about it he’d go,  _ Noo, Eddie, it’s in honor of Bev! I gotta pay my respects to Mizz Marsh! _ Like you were fucking dead instead of in Portland.” Eddie mimed holding a cigarette between his fingers and waving it around dramatically. “Whenever he stubbed them out he’d do a Voice and say some shit like,  _ To Beverly Marsh, she was a great man! A real stand up fella! _ ”

Bev snorted. “God, I forget you all went to high school together. It’s weird to think about you all remembering me back then. I can’t imagine you all as teenagers.”

“Well, Bill moved halfway through freshman year and Ben the summer after. It was just me, Rich, Stan, and Mike who graduated together. But, yeah, I can’t imagine high school Bev either.”

“Tell me then, what was teen Eddie like?”

Eddie closed his eyes, trying to make sense of the whirlwind of suppressed memories only recently regained. He laughed. “I was a fucking nightmare.”

“Oh?”

Eddie combed his hand through his hair, caught off guard by the reality of his high school self. “I guess after that summer and standing up to my mom, some spark of teenage rebellion lit. I mean, I was still me, but I think I broke someone's nose?”

“No!” Bev said, delighted.

“Apparently! Christ. I totally did. Some jackass called Richie a faggot and I punched him in the face.” Eddie explained. “I mean, I completely lost it afterward and hyperventilated in the bathroom until Richie could calm me down. I don’t even think I got in trouble though. That’s Derry for you.” Eddie shrugged.

“I guess once you’ve attacked a child-eating clown, a teenage homophobe is chump change.”

“I fucking guess. How about you, what was teen Beverly like?”

Bev deflated a little, her shoulders drooping. She blew a long stream of smoke between her lips and shrugged. “Well, I was fourteen and finally free of my father for the first time in my life, and I was alone in a new city with no friends and not even really able to remember how I got away.” Bev glanced down to Eddie’s hands and Eddie realized with a start that he was twisting his ring. Her gaze flicked up to his eyes. “You know how it goes.”

Eddie jerked his gaze away to stare back out at the parking lot. “I think I ruined my life.”

“Oh, Eddie.”

“No, Bev, really.” Eddie laughed, short and bitter. “I think what makes it worse is I had a choice. I had an opportunity to be happy and I said no.”

Bev put out her cigarette and scooted closer to him, tipping her head onto his shoulder. “You’re not dead yet.”

“I know that!” he snapped, and then caught himself and sighed. “It’s just, it’s just that I built this whole life for myself, and it’s fine, it’s livable. But now that I’m here, now that I remember, I know I could’ve been happy. Now I have to live with this.”

They were quiet for a moment, Eddie soaking in the dimly familiar comfort of Bev slumped against him. It had been so long since he’d had this, someone to talk to, to lean against. He remembered that they’d all been so all over each other as kids, chicken fighting in the quarry, riding on the backs of each other's bicycles, the easy exchange of hugs; Eddie didn’t have that anymore. Physical affection with Myra always felt uncomfortable, perfunctory, a little smothering, and always tinged with the anxiety that he was doing it wrong, that he was failing at it somehow.

Bev took a breath and sat up, back straight, eyes fixed sharply ahead. “If I survive this I’m never going back. I’m leaving him. I already left.”

Eddie looked at her, at the stubborn jut of her jaw and the orange glow of her hair in the sodium street lamps. “You were always the brave one,” he said.

Eddie had always envied her fearlessness. How she took a running leap into the quarry without balking for a second, that she was the only one with the guts to answer Bill’s call to action, the only one to didn’t try to wiggle out of going into Neibolt. Bill might’ve been leading the charge, in a grief stricken fury, but Bev was the only one who never hesitated to go into battle with him. Eddie wished he had that, wished he wasn’t caged by everything that could possibly go wrong, trapped in inaction, like holding himself still could keep anything bad from ever happening to him until eventually the world folded around him and encased him in amber.

Bev reached out and grabbed Eddie’s hand. She gave it a firm squeeze. “We got this, Eddie.”

Eddie squeezed her hand back and she smiled at him before standing back up, dusting herself off, and heading inside. Eddie wasn’t sure if she was talking about the clown or not, but he hoped she was right. For her sake, if anything, Bev deserved the chance to be happy.

—

**Derry, Maine, 1994**

  
  


Eddie was stretched out in his bed, allegedly finishing his homework but mostly listening to his Walkman and staring at his ceiling. His window was pushed open, though it wasn’t particularly warm. Spring rarely meant much relief from the cold in Maine, even as late as May, but Eddie liked the cool breezes that would drift through his window, smelling like new leaves and rain.

Over the music in his headphones, he heard the familiar rattle of his windscreen being shoved up and flopped over onto his stomach to look at the window.

"Someday you're going to break your fucking neck, Richie."

Richie was crouching cramped on the windowsill; the years of never-ending growth spurts disagreed with his habit of crawling in through Eddie's window. "Damn, fuck me then, I'm going home," he said.

Eddie rolled his eyes but waved him in like he always did.

Richie scrambled inside, unceremoniously shucking off his backpack and jacket onto Eddie's floor and toeing off his dirty sneakers before flopping onto the foot of Eddie's bed. Eddie wriggled into a sitting position and slipped his headphones around his neck, glancing down at Richie, who was sprawled out half on the bed, half off, his glasses a little askew, and his shaggy hair fanning out beneath his head. 

"You need a haircut." Eddie did not want Richie to get a haircut.

Richie grinned up at Eddie crookedly. "Do I now? Should I get a neat little Mormon do like you have?"

"Shut up! My hair is not Mormon, dipshit, it's just well groomed."

Richie sat up ramrod straight and turned to Eddie, a bright and vacant smile plastered across his face. "Hello, sir, can I interest you in the good word of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ," Richie sing-songed.

Eddie lurched across the bed to shove Richie hard, who collapsed in a fit of laughter. Eddie tried to look angry, but he could feel laughter in his throat and the corners of his mouth traitorously tugging up. "Dumbshit," he huffed, punching Richie in the arm.

"Hey." Richie raised his eyebrows up and down. "Hey, Eds."

"What?"

"Can I copy your math homework?"

"Do your own homework, asshole!"

"Please," Richie whined.

Eddie picked up his pillow and thwacked him in the face with it. "No."

"Pretty please, Eddie Spaghetti, my dear old friend." Richie tried to press his palms together in supplication but had to abandon the endeavor to defend himself against Eddie attacking him with his pillow again. "Ed—"  _ Thwack _ . "Please—"  _ Thwack _ . "I'll let you—"  _ Thwack _ . "Eduardo, mi compadre—"  _ Thwack _ .

By the time Eddie finally relented, they were both laughing, and Richie was breathing hard, his cheeks and ears a little pink, his hair even messier than before. Eddie felt hot all over and made the conscious decision to attribute it to the physical exertion of attacking Richie. He sat back on his heels and sighed dramatically before dropping his Trapper Keeper on Richie's chest.

"I owe you my life." Richie threw his hands up over the Trapper Keeper like he was clutching his heart.

Richie shuffled up into a sitting position and then hooked his foot into the strap of his backpack, dragging it towards him, and then bent over to rifle through it, pulling out various crumpled sheets of paper from the bottom of it and smoothing them out until he finally found the right worksheet. He then began the process again of rifling through the bottom of his backpack for a pen that worked or a pencil that wasn't broken before Eddie rolled his eyes and poked him in the arm with one of his own pens. Richie grabbed it and blew him an exaggerated kiss.

Eddie slipped his headphones back on and settled back against his headboard, picking back up his neglected poetry analysis and grabbing another pen from his bedside table and twirling it absently between his fingers as he scrutinized "Kubla Khan," feeling decidedly bored and frustrated.

"What the fuck is a pleasure dome," he grumbled, resisting the urge to crumple up the handout and throw it across the room.

Richie's eyes flicked over to Eddie, glinting with mischief. "Well—"

"Do not answer that."

Richie snickered but went back to copying Eddie's calculus homework. Eddie heard Richie hum thoughtfully and then felt him tap him on the ankle. "You did question eight wrong."

Eddie leaned over and grabbed the worksheet out of Richie's hands, checking over question eight. "Where?"

"The negative sign is inside the parenthesis but you multiplied it like it was outside," Richie shifted over and tapped the offending negative sign. "PEMDAS, bitch."

"Ah, fuck." Eddie scratched out the question and redid it, glancing at Richie when he arrived at the new answer and received a nod of approval. "Thanks."

Richie tugged the worksheet back out of Eddie's hands and returned to copying down his answers and Eddie returned to scribbling down thoughtless bullshit for his poetry analysis.

_ Beware! Beware! _

_ His flashing eyes, his floating hair! _ the handout read.

Eddie peered over the top of it at Richie who was holding the tip of his tongue between his teeth and idly twisting one of his innumerable flyaways around his finger. Eddie found himself wondering what it would feel like to do that himself. He forced himself to look back at his handout. Fucking beware indeed.

This was how most school nights went senior year. Richie would show up at his window to copy a piece of Eddie's homework he didn't really need to copy and Eddie would drag himself through whatever assignment he had been leaving to the last minute while Richie interrupted him when he caught Eddie's mistakes or just to be annoying. After Richie finished whatever he had allegedly come over to work on, he always lingered. Sometimes he had a new mixtape he wanted to show Eddie, sometimes he would be caught in a flash of nostalgia and show up with a comic book for them to flip through together, most of the time they would just talk, ribbing each other, fishing for laughter and elbow jabs. Eventually, he would finally cram his shit back into his backpack and crawl back out the way he came, out the window and down the tree, like the overgrown squirrel he was.

It wasn't like Eddie and Richie hadn't always spent a lot of time together, they had been close friends further back than their memory easily extended. But maybe it had to do with it being senior year, with the way Beverly never called, and then Bill never called and then Ben never called, with the way the paths of their lives pointed different directions on their way out of Derry. Maybe it had to do with the privacy of Eddie's bedroom at night, with Eddie's mother dead to the world on sleeping pills. How that meant the rules of how they were allowed to act fuzzed out at the edges. If Eddie threw his legs into Richie's lap and Richie drummed along to the new song he was showing Eddie on his shins, it was because there were only so many ways two seventeen-year-old boys could fit onto a twin-sized bed. If their shoulders pressed together while they puzzled through a particularly difficult problem set together, if Eddie, tired from track practice, let his cheek rest on Richie's shoulder, then neither of them would mention it and no one else would be there to point it out it either.

This evening felt a little subdued. Eddie wasn't sure why, but even as they both finished the last of their work, neither of them moved to say much. It wasn't exactly bad; as talkative as they both were, he didn't mind being quiet with Richie. It was nice just to be in the same space, to know he was here, within arms reach. There was a part of him, a little desperate, a little sad, definitely selfish, that wanted to reach out and grab Richie by the arm and hold him here in this moment, not moving forward, not moving back. The minute the thought ran its course Eddie's skin crawled in disgust for a million different reasons he didn't want to name. Eddie didn't want to keep them there, not really, he didn't want to trap Richie, he didn't want to trap himself. He still kind of wanted to grab his arm.

A cold gust of wind blew in through the window, making Eddie shiver and sending a few of the loose papers that escaped Richie's backpack skittering across the floor. Eddie breathed in the smell of trees. He had never been allergic to pollen.

"Sometimes I think I'm going to disappear when I leave Derry," Eddie said to the wall opposite him.

"We don't disappear when we leave, Eddie. Remember when Mike found that short story that Bill wrote on the web last October?"

"I don't mean literally!"

"What do you mean then?"

Eddie crossed his arms, breathing through the tightening in his throat. "I just... Sometimes I wonder if it'd be worth it to stay in Derry just so I don't..." So he didn't what? Didn't quietly vanish to wherever his friends who had left Derry vanished to? Derry was horrible but it was a known horror, he knew where he was here, who he was here. He didn't know what would happen to him when he left. All he knew is that it meant he was going to lose his friends, that he was going to lose Richie.

Eddie didn't elaborate, but Richie didn't press him to, he just hooked his hand around the back of his own neck. "And stay here?" Richie gestured his free hand in a wide arc, unclear whether he was referring to Derry as a whole or Eddie's childhood bedroom. "Eddie, you'd suffocate."

He was right. Eddie hated that he was right.

"I'm not staying either," Richie added. "You couldn't fucking pay me to stay in Derry."

It was ending. He could feel it ending. They had prom and graduation and one last summer to throw apples at each other at the Hanlon farm and get yelled at by Stan for scaring away the birds and then it would be over. There was a crushing finality to it, an inevitability, a storm he had watched rolling towards him for the past five years.

He wondered what he would do if Richie asked him to stay, if Richie asked him to forget college and run away with him to California like he said sometimes like it was a joke. He wondered if he wanted Richie to. But Richie wasn't going to ask. Richie was standing with Eddie watching the storm roll in, waiting for the rain to wash over them.

—

**Derry, Maine, 2016**

  
  


Richie held the invitation to his funeral in his hand and he almost wanted to laugh. Really? That was the best Pennywise could do? Dredge up the same old shit he tormented Richie with when he was thirteen? If Richie was being honest with himself, disappearing without a trace almost sounded like a relief.

When he was thirteen sometimes he couldn't sleep at night thinking about the missing children posters plastered five layers deep to the walls and lamp posts of Derry. He lay awake haunted by the way no one seemed to care, the way no one seemed to even remember. If it was him, would anybody miss him? Would anybody look for him? Would anybody care if he was gone at all?

Now that he was forty he could say with certainty the answer was no. If Trashmouth Tozier, tolerated by few, beloved by none, died tomorrow in a sewer, he would trend on Twitter maybe for a day, and then it would be like he never existed. His closed casket funeral would be attended by his agent, maybe, and a handful of people in the industry that he sometimes talked to that felt obligated to be polite. There was nobody in L.A. who would truly mourn him, and honestly, Richie didn't particularly care.

Richie moved to crumple the invitation and chuck it in the trash when his eye caught on the Paul Bunyan statue, looming above him. The memory of being chased by it through the park floated up to the top of his head.

"Are you going to make that thing chase me around again, too?" he muttered under his breath. He shoved his hands into his pockets and turned to leave.

"Didja miss me," It said. "Cause I missed you."

Richie froze, his blood turning to ice in an instant. He hadn't anticipated the intensity of the fear.

"No one wants to play with the clown anymore," Pennywise whined. "Play a game with me, Richie? How 'bout Street Fighter? Oh, yes, you like that one don't you? Or maybe," It trailed off a moment, before smiling grotesquely. "Truth or Dare?"

Richie's stomach churned and he stumbled backward.

"Oh, but you wouldn't want anyone to pick truth though, Richie? You wouldn't want anyone to know what you're hiding? Even little Eddie is too disgusted by you to tell anyone about what happened. Little ol' Eddie was so disturbed he pushed you all the way across the country so he could wash his hands of you."

Pennywise started drifting down to him and Richie couldn't move. He just stood there, feeling his heart throw itself wildly against his ribs, begging him to run.

"No one would ever come near you if they knew, Richie. Barely anyone will come near you now. You've never been good at hiding it, have you?"

Richie was completely frozen except for the trembling that wracked his body. He squeezed his eyes shut, willing it to stop, willing it to be over quickly. This was why he was alone. This was why he would always be alone. He was alone because there was something wrong with him. He was alone because it was easier than letting anyone near enough to see it, it was easier than letting anyone close enough to be disgusted.

Except.

Except, Stan knew.

Stan had known.

Stan wasn't disgusted.

It was then that Richie remembered with a start that he did have people who would miss him if he died, who had already been missing him for the past twenty-some years. He had missed them so much, even if he couldn't remember their faces or names, he missed them like a bird misses the sky.

Something white and hot was burning in Richie's chest, and it took him a moment to even register what it was before he realized he was angry. Richie hadn't lost the Losers, they were taken from him. He had been fed a lie his entire adult life, had every good memory, every moment he had loved and been loved in return stolen from him. For every time some mouth-breathing troglodyte had tried to knock his teeth out or hurled slurs at him, there was Eddie in a flash of brilliant rage screaming back at them before making Richie sprint away with him until his sides cramped. There was Stan quietly listening Richie's nervous rambling about how fucking stupid it was for people to call him gay just because they hated him before pausing thoughtfully and saying that it was a stupid insult. There was Mike never asking questions if Richie showed up unannounced at his house, and letting Richie tag along while he did farm chores. For every night alone in his bedroom stewing in shame, there were sunny Saturdays on the Hanlon farm or afternoons spent lazing in the clubhouse.

And those were stolen from him.

"Fuck you," he spit. "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!"

Pennywise hulked and lurched forward, opening Its mouth wide, wet and glistening with teeth. Richie stumbles back, tightening his fist around the token in his sweaty palm.

"I'm going to kill you," he growled at It.

—

The clown was dead.

It was a very small shriveled thing in a looming dark cavern. Eddie found it hard to imagine how It had ever filled such a place, even though it had only been moments ago. He felt a little woozy. He was shivering; his clothes were soaking wet and plastered to his skin, and he really didn’t want to think about what they were soaked with. Blood was still running down his arms from where It had stabbed him. 

Eddie almost died. He was painfully aware that he almost died. One second he had been triumphant, hovering over Richie, blood rushing in his ears. The next second he heard Stan scream something like "Move!" and felt Richie roll him away. Distantly, he was aware he was in tremendous amounts of pain. For someone so meticulously cautious, so fearful of it, the pain was never as bad as he thought it would be, even the worst of it. At least he was alive to feel it.

He almost died. Eddie couldn't stop thinking it, the knowledge chasing itself in circles around his head. Eddie had almost died and he thought if he had to die, dying to save Richie seemed one of the better ways to go, to finally do something worthwhile right before the end.

Eddie almost died but he didn't. He was alive and breathing and bleeding in this fucking sewer, standing over the withered corpse of the alien clown that ruined his life, or at least gave him the tools to ruin it himself. He was alive. It was dead. He had a whole second half of his life in front of him, with no carnival specter to loom over it. He didn't know what to do with it.

He didn't know how to go back to his life, not when he was covered in blood, standing knee-deep in gray water, surrounded by the best friends he didn't know he lost. He didn't know how to go back to his job in New York and his tidy little apartment. It seemed like something that belonged to someone else, someone who didn't kill evil demon clowns. He didn't know how to go back to his wife.

Eddie started laughing then, a little hysterical. It was funny really. His life was such a joke. He had almost died as Edward Kaspbrak, faithful husband and accomplished senior risk analyst. He laughed harder.

"You okay, Eds?" Richie asked.

Eddie was alive. He was in love with him.

He took a gulp of air to collect himself, still feeling a little dizzy and giggly. "I need to leave my wife," he said matter-of-factly, and then he promptly collapsed.

—

Eddie dipped in and out of consciousness as they left the sewer, distantly aware of being alternately carried and dragged along by someone who smelled a lot like sewer and blood. He could hear the occasional frantic comment about blood loss or sepsis, and if he had the energy he would laugh about rubbing off on his friends, but everything was too fuzzy, and laughing seemed like a lot of work.

Eventually, Eddie found himself blinking awake again for a moment in the light, his legs stretched out on the grass, his torso held fiercely in Richie's arms. He could feel something being tied around his arm, tight enough to hurt, and turned his head with enormous effort to see Stan crouched beside him, brow furrowed in concentration. Beverly, Bill, and Ben were huddled close to Mike a few feet away, who was talking urgently on the phone.

Something was dripping on him. He rolled his head back up to see Richie was crying.

He used his good arm to elbow him. "Stop that," he croaked.

"Stop passing out from blood loss first," Richie replied wetly. "What the fuck, Eddie. Seriously, how did you not notice how much you were bleeding? Why didn't you say anything?"

"He's gonna be fine, Richie, the ambulance is on its way," Stan said.

Eddie nodded in agreement. He felt shockingly confident in that. "I refuse to die because a clown stabbed my arm," he said flatly.

Richie laughed a little at that. "You better. I'm going to be so mad at you if you die."

"Well, I'm not going to, so stop crying on me."

"You can't tell me what to do."

Stan sighed loudly and Eddie laughed, shifting slightly to tuck himself closer against Richie, who did not protest and shifted his grip to hold him closer.

"This is going to be exhausting," Stan said flatly.

  
  


—

  
  


Eddie spent the night in the hospital. The Losers had all offered to stay overnight with him but Eddie insisted they all desperately needed a fucking shower. It had taken some extra reassurance from the doctor that Eddie was fine and would be discharged in the morning for Richie to finally warily concede to spending the night at the Townhouse. 

Stan and Beverly both were both half-asleep in his bed while Richie paced back and forth across his room like a zoo animal. Bill, Mike, and Ben stopped in to "check in on everyone," but had looked directly at Richie when they said "everyone." It was embarrassing how obvious he was being in front of everyone, but Richie really couldn't bring himself to care that much. Sure, it was humiliating that Eddie definitely knew that Richie was a hopeless idiot who was still hung up on him, but at least Eddie was alive to be embarrassed of him.

"I'm fine, guys," Richie said a little snippily. "I don't need you all to babysit me."

"Don't be a dick, Richie," Stan said.

"Yeah, Richie," Bev joined in. She yawned and kept talking through it. "Don't be a dick."

"You do remember who I am right? Like my personality?"

"It's coming back to me," Stan said.

Richie sighed, tipping his head back. "I'm okay, really, thank you for checking on me after you had to watch me cry for an hour. Your duties as my friend have been fulfilled, you can all go to sleep or whatever now."

Bill crossed the room to reassuringly squeeze Richie’s shoulder, which was a little comical given how much Bill had to reach up to grab his shoulder. Richie gave him the good grace of sparing him a joke about his height.

Bill, Mike, and Ben moved to leave his room but Richie cleared his throat. "Wait," he said. They stopped in the doorway, glancing back at him. "Since you're all here, I should probably just get this over with now."

Richie paused, felt the weight of five pairs of eyes on him. He had obviously had more eyes on him than that before, but these eyes mattered. He debated the merits of abruptly leaving the room. Fuck it, if he could kill a demon clown, he could bare his soul to his friends. What was the point of everything he had just gone through if he still couldn't?

"I'm gay," he said.

There was a beat where Richie had to stop himself from wincing, but then Mike cut in with, "Thanks for telling us, Richie."

"Yeah, thank you for trusting us with this," Ben said.

Richie really did not want to cry any more than he had already cried today. "Can someone please make fun of me? I feel like I'm breaking out in hives."

"Nope!" Stan called from the bed grinning broadly.

"Suck it up, Richie! We love and accept you!" Bev joined in.

"I guess I'll deal with it," Richie said thickly.

Stan levered himself out of the bed and crossed the room to hug Richie, quickly followed by the rest of them. Richie's resolution to not cry again crumbled without much resistance. It was a relief.

Wrapped firmly in the arms of his friends, with the knowledge that Eddie was safe and alive somewhere nearby, Richie felt something like hope for the first time in fifteen years.

—

Eddie did not like hospitals. He didn't like the way they smelled. Didn't like the way they sounded. Didn't like the implication that if he was in the hospital, something was wrong. There were scarce happy reasons to be in a hospital. Sure, most of his visits throughout his life had been for no reason at all, but the fact that he was in a hospital for legitimate reasons this time brought him little comfort.

He was fine, really. He had lost a substantial amount of blood, but he was recovering quickly, and the doctor really only wanted to keep him overnight to keep an eye out for infection, since he had been crawling around a sewer with an open wound. All of the Losers had offered to stay with him overnight, but he had insisted they go shower and sleep. Richie had been particularly reluctant to leave him there, but he was ushered out with everyone else.

In the cold white hospital room, Eddie was regretting sending everyone away a little bit. The adrenaline had worn off, and the rush of his near-death experience was fading, and everything that had happened seemed a little unreal. He wished he had someone here, just that he could see as proof of it all. Proof of the last two days, proof of his childhood he had only just remembered, proof that there was more of himself than he thought could possibly exist.

He felt as though there were two versions of himself, Derry Eddie and New York Eddie, and those two people couldn't possibly both be him. Derry Eddie threw rocks and fence posts, he pushed back against the bars of his cage, he looked the devil in the eye and fought It tooth and nail for his friends. New York Eddie barely seemed like a person. New York Eddie just woke up every day and went through the motions of having a life to the best of his ability, and if someone decided to change part of it by giving him a promotion or marrying him, he just let it happen and continued on his way. It was fine, but he wasn't a person.

This separation of self of course raised the question of who the hell was Eddie in the summer of 2000. That Eddie didn't fight monsters, but he also drank blueberry coffee and kissed Richie, a feat that Derry Eddie never quite managed. Whoever he was then, ever so briefly, Eddie didn't mind him. He was a glimmer of hope that maybe when all this was over, and he was on a flight back to New York, his soul wouldn't leave his body when he got off the plane. Maybe he could still be brave, even if he didn't have a literal monster to fight.

—

The next morning Eddie was discharged from the hospital. All the Losers came to pick him up and they all piled into their rental cars and Mike's truck to drive to a little diner for brunch. They were all exhausted, with bags under their eyes and rumpled clothes, but there was a lightness to them, a sense of relief and joy. It was dead and they all were alive. So they piled their plates high with eggs and hashbrowns and bacon. It was stupendously greasy. Eddie stole the orange slices off Richie’s plate and tore the fruit away from the peel with his teeth, and Richie cut the occasional hesitant glance to Eddie. The air hummed in harmony with the fluorescent lights, and Eddie felt a little strange and unreal, but not unpleasantly.

Bev stabbed a piece of pancake and pointed to Eddie with her fork, "So, Eddie, you're getting a divorce?"

Eddie sighed. "I probably should."

"Nice." Bev shoved the bit of pancake in her mouth and continued while chewing, "Want to comparison shop for divorce lawyers together when we get back to New York?"

Eddie smiled. "Yeah, let's do that."

Eddie couldn't lie to himself and say he was looking forward to going back to New York after running off suddenly with almost no explanation and turning off his cellphone, only to reappear with a bandaged arm and a hole in his face to demand a divorce, but knowing that he'd be going through it together with Bev was a comfort. It made the strange new world he had found himself in seem a little more familiar.

"So, Eds and Bev are team divorce. Anyone else making any drastic life changes?" Richie asked conversationally.

"I just want to go home to Patty and try to... Explain myself, I guess," Stan said, pushing his eggs around with his fork. "I think a lot of things make so much more sense now, but I have to figure out how to tell her."

"You're going to tell her about It?" Bill asked, a little incredulously.

"I think I have to try, I mean, she's my wife. I can't keep something like this a secret from her."

"Huh, I guess..." Bill swallowed and pressed his mouth into a hard line. "I guess that makes sense."

There was a beat of silence where Eddie watched Stan burn a hole into Bill's head with the force of his both concerned and vaguely disapproving stare. Mike cleared his throat.

"I think I'm going to go traveling. I want to road trip my way across the country, visit some National Parks, explore some cities along the way, and try to see a little more of the world."

Richie grinned. "Well, if you need recommendations on shitty comedy clubs to visit and the closest restaurant to said shitty comedy club that is open after eleven, I'm your man."

"I'll be sure to keep that in mind," Mike said. "I've still got some time to research. I've got to get my stuff packed up and moved into storage before I leave."

"I can stay and help you move," Richie blurted.

"Oh, Richie, you really don't have to. I'll be okay on my own."

"Oh, no fucking way am I leaving you alone in Derry, Pennywise or no Pennywise. Last time I did that you moved into the attic of a library and studied clownology for twenty years," Richie said. "Also, I could use a breather before I go back to L.A. to get murdered by my manager."

Mike smiled at that. "Alright, Richie. I guess a spare hand packing up would be nice."

Richie clapped his hands together. "So that's settled then! Should we have an annual income pissing contest to decide who foots the bill?"

Everyone groaned and Stan slapped the check down in front of Richie in retribution, and Richie made no move to protest. Ben was passing around a scrap of paper for everyone to scribble their contact information onto so he could make a group chat. Eddie wrote down his number but didn't bother putting down his address. It was strangely satisfying that he could still recognize Richie's handwriting.

Richie had been holding him at an arm's length all morning. It made Eddie want to eat drywall. He wondered if there was a Wikihow article titled "What to do after your long lost childhood best friend/sort of ex-boyfriend/love of your life cries on you while he cradles you in his arms after you almost got killed by an evil clown that ate your memories and separated you in the first place?"

He doubted it for some reason.

Eddie wasn't sure what he was supposed to feel exactly. To the best of his knowledge, it seemed like he was mostly annoyed. It was stupid! It was stupid that Richie was right there in front of him and Eddie had no idea how to navigate that. It was stupid that Eddie had married Myra when he was almost certain he was probably gay, and that aside, he still absolutely should not have married Myra. It was stupid that Eddie hadn't quit his stupid job all those years also and let himself be an impulsive twenty-five year old and follow Richie to L.A.

But, that is what happened, and now Eddie was in a diner in Derry. Whatever it was he was doing, it was bigger than whatever the fuck was happening, had happened, would happen between Richie and himself. He was alive, and he had to find a way to keep living because he wasn't sure whatever he had been doing for the past fifteen years counted.

But a newfound commitment to being less of a miserable bastard aside, the whole Richie situation still made him want to rip his hair out. He needed to do something. If he had learned anything in the past two days, it was that as appealing as doing nothing was, it would ruin your fucking life.

Yes, Eddie decided. He would do something.

—

Eddie had an hour left if he was going to do something before he flew back to New York with Bev. Eddie had always been good with deadlines in his opinion, insisting that he always turned things in on time, even when Stan raised his eyebrows at him as he did his math homework in the hallway before class. Stan had already left for the airport with Bill, so he was not here to raise his eyebrows at Eddie as he paced the length of his hotel room furiously and repacked his toiletry kit for the fourth time. 

The problem was Eddie still didn’t know what he was supposed to do at all and he was running out of time. Well, maybe he wasn’t running out of time. Stan had already texted the new group chat from Atlanta, saying his memories seem perfectly intact, and Bill texted from his layover in Chicago to say the same. Maybe Eddie didn’t have to do this perfectly, maybe he had time to make mistakes. 

He zipped his toiletry kit shut and put it in his suitcase. He took a deep breath. He marched down the hall and banged on Richie’s door. 

Richie opened it after an agonizing second. “Heading out?” Richie asked. 

“Um,” Eddie said. “Not yet.”  _ Fuck _ . 

Richie smiled. Eddie knew him well enough to tell it was a nervous one. “What’s up?”

“Can I come in?”

“Sure.” Richie stepped back from the doorway.

In the ensuing silence, Eddie considered the benefits of crawling right back into the sewers. He begrudgingly decided against it. 

“I’m not getting divorced because of you,” he finally blurted. 

Richie winced. “Jeez, Eds. You didn’t have to say it.”

Eddie flushed. “Let me finish, dipshit.” He took a breath. “I’m getting divorced because you’re right about all the psychosexual Freudian bullshit and we make each other miserable. Also, I’m gay, which is probably reason enough in itself.”

“Uh—”

“Still talking!” Eddie shot. If he lost momentum now he was never going to get this out. “I know we haven’t seen each other in fifteen years and we only dated that one summer and you’re like a celebrity now and I honestly have no idea what you even get up to these days, so it probably barely even mattered—” Eddie sucked in a breath. “Fuck. What I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t just that summer. For me.” With mounting horror, Eddie realized he might be on the verge of tears. At some point during his confessional, he had stopped being able to look at Richie and he was still staring at the wall behind him. “Sorry,” he forced out. “I just needed to say it.”

“Hey, want to see something stupid I did when I was thirteen?” Richie asked. 

“Rich, if you’re just trying to make me feel better—”

Eddie felt Richie’s hand wrap around his forearm. He couldn’t tell if he felt comforted or humiliated. “Trust me?” Richie asked.

Eddie forced himself to look at Richie’s face. Richie was a little wild-eyed. He let his arm relax into Richie’s grip. “Okay. I trust you.”

—

Eddie was too keyed up to really pay attention to where Richie was driving him. When Richie finally pulled over on the side of the road and got out, Eddie climbed out of the car without any idea where he was really. It took several long seconds of Richie staring at him nervously before he finally processed where he was. 

“Oh, holy shit,” he said. 

Richie grimaced. “Yep.”

“Did you say thirteen, Richie? Fucking thirteen?”

“I know, I know,” Richie said, nodding and holding his hands up in acquiescence. 

“Well, show me where it is! I want to see it!” Eddie demanded. 

Richie dipped his head and patrolled down the length of the Kissing Bridge, and Eddie jogged around the car to follow him. Finally, Richie crouched down and jabbed a spot on the wood with his finger. Eddie crouched down next to him.

There it was. Clear as day. Sharp letters carved into the wood, a bit weathered by the years.

R+E

Eddie traced the letters with his finger and let out a long breath. He stared at it a moment longer. Then he stood up and dusted off his pants. He wordlessly extended a hand to Richie to help him back up and Richie stood quietly. Then Eddie grabbed the front of Richie’s jacket and hauled him down into a kiss. 

Eddie felt Richie’s hands come up to cradle the back of his head and Eddie let go of Richie’s jacket so he could sling his arms around his neck. Something was unwinding in Eddie’s chest and he could almost cry with the relief of it. 

After some indeterminable amount of time, they broke apart, and Eddie tucked his face into the crook of Richie’s neck to collect himself. “I have to catch my flight,” Eddie said and he could feel Richie shake slightly with quiet laughter against him. 

Eddie lifted his head back up and moved just far enough back to look Richie in the face while he spoke to him. “Okay. I have to go back to New York and get fucking divorced, and you’re staying here to help out Mike. I still don’t know what the hell we’re doing, but we’re gonna do something.”

Richie was grinning at him like an absolute lovesick moron. Eddie couldn’t stand him. “Okay,” Richie said. 

“We’re gonna figure this out. We have time,” Eddie said, mostly to himself. Richie nodded along. “I’m not losing you again.”

Something in Richie’s expression crumpled slightly and he pulled Eddie back against him, holding him fiercely. “You’re stuck with me now, Eds. I’m going to bother you every single day from here on out. No getting rid of me.”

Eddie huffed a little laugh and squeezed Richie in return. Then he said, “Hey, do you have a knife?”

“Do I have a what?”

“A knife, or like a screwdriver or something.”

“Why would I have a knife?”

“I don’t know man, we fought a clown like two days ago! Why wouldn’t you have a knife?”

“Why wouldn’t I— Oh, wait, actually.” Richie patted the pockets of his jacket and then pulled out a pocket knife and handed it to Eddie. 

“Thank you,” he said, and then he grinned and kissed Richie on the cheek just because he could, enjoying the way Richie’s ears immediately turned bright red. 

He pried the knife open and crouched back down. He made deliberate cuts, etching the R+E Richie had carved all those years ago deeper into the wood. Satisfied with his work, he closed the knife and stood back up, slipping it back into Richie’s pocket. 

“There. Now we’ve both left our indelible mark on this godforsaken town.”

“ _ Indelible _ ?” Richie raised an eyebrow. 

“Shut the fuck up. Can you drive me to the airport now, so I can sort out my shit and we can get on with the rest of our lives?” Eddie asked. 

Richie took Eddie’s hand and interlaced their fingers. He smiled. “Sounds like a plan.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! A huge huge thank you to [Maggie](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/declanapologist) for betaing this fic, it would not be what it is without her feedback. 
> 
> You can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/clownmeems) and [tumblr](https://matthiasnonius.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> Maybe keep an eye out for a brief epilogue.
> 
> The title is from the poem "Not Doing Something Wrong Isn’t the Same as Doing Something Right" by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thank you to tumblr user @declanapologist for encouraging me to write this and then betaing it for me. Also thanks to my friend who isn't very active on social media but listened to me scream abt constantly. love u E
> 
> find me @calmdownthehawk on tumblr and @clownmelia on twt
> 
> title is from the poem "Not Doing Something Wrong Isn’t the Same as Doing Something Right" by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
> 
> specifically from the last stanza 
> 
> "So in my defense, when he touched me the lights of my body came on.  
> In my defense, the windows were thrown open. In my defense, spring."


End file.
